With now more than 40 Senators saying they would support the public option in a reconciliation vote, Dick Durbin is trying to put the brakes on the process, saying that liberals may be asked to oppose the amendment [sub req] now that they’ve said they would support it. Roll Call reports:

Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged Wednesday that liberals may be asked to oppose any amendment, including one creating a public option, to ensure a smooth ride for the bill. “We have to tell people, ‘You just have to swallow hard’ and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen,” Durbin, who supports a public option, told reporters. “We have to move this forward. We know the Republicans are likely to offer a lot of amendments, and some of them may be appealing to Democrats, but we have to urge them to stick with the bill.”

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), a leading centrist, suggested Democrats should be able to avoid blowing up a reconciliation package if there is ample negotiation on it before it hits the floor. But Carper appeared to warn his Democratic colleagues that any move to amend the reconciliation bill, however noble the policy aims, would only lead to chaos.

That’s the same Tom Carper whose contribution to the hcr debate was the deservedly short-lived opt-in, triggered co-op. But regardless of how worthless his contribution to the debate has been, he still gets a vote. As should Senate liberals, who as of yet aren’t backing down.

But prominent Senate liberals said they are determined to put the public option question to the test when reconciliation comes to the floor.

“I think we have got to do everything that we can to get a public option so that is absolutely something … somebody can and should do,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats.

Sanders said liberals have not decided who would offer such an amendment. However, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) led a petition drive to get Senators to sign a letter pledging their support for it. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has been tracking the letter signatories and Member statements, projects 41 firm votes in favor of the public option.

Sanders said he believes supporters will have the votes when the amendment comes up. “I can’t swear it to you, but I do think we can,” Sanders said. “I think that some people for whatever reason choose not to sign a letter but will vote. Yeah, I think we’ve got it.”

This largely seems to be an effort to discourage any amendments from being offered, though there is no indication as of yet that anyone other than public option supporters are being told to stand down. The Roll Call story says that other Senators, including Wyden and Boxer, “declined to rule out trying to change the reconciliation measure on the floor” pending knowing what will actually be in the reconciliation fix.

Socialist. Death panels. Downright evil. Those are just some of the talking points Sarah Palin uses to describe the Democrat’s health care plan. Well, I…

Blanche Lincoln’s newest ad is a bit of a strange beast. In it, she distances herself from the Democratic Party, slams the public option, and tells us what Washington, DC is really like…or at least what she wants us to think it’s really like.

In response, we decided to put together a little remix of Lincoln’s ad that sets the record straight…on what Blanche Lincoln’s Washington is really like.

Watch:

Contribute to Bill Halter
Bill Halter for Senate
Volunteer

I can’t wait to see the Lincoln campaign issue a press release claiming Halter has answered the public option a seventh different way.

Contribute to Bill Halter
Bill Halter for Senate
Volunteer

Delaware’s Ted Kaufman s the 34th Senator to voice support for passing the public option through reconciliation (see the entire list of supporters).

“I’m for a public option, if there’s some way that it can get done,” he said. “If it qualified under reconciliation, then I would,” he said, when asked if he’d vote for it on the floor.

Kaufman is the 34th Senator to commit to supporting the public option through reconciliation. Two others — Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) — are public option supporters but have not committed to passing it through reconciliation.

With their support, public option backers would be 14 votes short of victory; White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said recently he doesn’t think there is enough “political support” for the public option in the Senate. Reconciliation allows the majority to pass budget-related legislation with 50 votes plus a tie-breaker from Vice President Joe Biden.

Additionally, Sherrod Brown says he’ll push for a separate public option amendment, if it’s not included in the reconcilaition package.

Brown, a liberal Democrat, told reporters that he hopes that Democratic leaders include a public plan in the current package but said that he would “absolutely” try to cobble together a different proposal if it is not.

“If we don’t get it on this. I still hope we get it on this. If we don’t get it on this, we can give it a try,” he said. Asked if that meant passing separate legislation, he answered “Absolutely, absolutely, oh yeah.”

We have heard months’ worth of assurances from Brown that the public option would be in Senate bill and/or included in the final bill after conference. There is no reason not to have this vote, however, now that a large majority of the Democratic Senate caucus (and 120 House members) have said they want it.

At the very least, this enduringly popular piece of the reform package should get an up or down vote.

The Arkansas Times has the writeup and video:

Halter said 1) on card check. Compromise legislation is in the works, which he hasn’t seen, but which includes elements he favors – accelerated union elections; protection of workers against undue pressure; exemptions for small businesses; 2) health care. He said the words “public option” had come to mean things good and bad on both sides of the debate. He said he had health care ideas – emphasis on preventive medicine, better use of technology to cut costs, for example. Most  significantly, he mentioned interest in a program that would allow a voluntary buy-in to Medicare, a voluntary public option of a sort. He defended his support by labor unions, which represent working people, and cited thousands of small contributors in the beginning hours of his campaign by contrast with major corporate  PAC contributions. He was non-commital on the cap-and-trade legislation currently before the Senate.

While the Halter campaign promises more details on these issues as the campaign rolls out, Greg Sargent got a Halter to offer more specifics on health care:

In an interview with me just now, Halter made it official: He fully supports the public option, and expects it to be an issue in the campaign.

Asked directly if he supported a public plan that would give folks access to Medicare or something like it, Halter answered: “Yes.”

“If you give individuals the opportuinity to voluntarily buy into a system like Medicare, there is broad support for that,” Halter said.

Asked directly whether he’d back a reconciliation vote on the public option — and the use of reconciliation in general to pass reform, which Lincoln has hedged on — Halter answered Yes on both counts.

“Reconciliation has been used multiple times not just on tax bills but on health bills,” he said.

Contribute to Bill Halter
Bill Halter for Senate
Volunteer

The list of Democratic Senators who have pledged their support for the public option through reconciliation now stands at 30, including a majority of the Democratic caucus. It also now includes the senate’s #2 Democrat, Dick Durbin.

Whether they mean it or not, Democratic Senators are approaching the point where they must deliver. It’s not clear what the tipping point will be (40? 45? 50?), but with more than half the Senate Democratic caucus on the record supporting the public option through reconciliation, that tipping point is drawing nearer. Thanks to the unflagging efforts of the public option’s supporters, Democratic Senators are running out of places to hide.

Undoubtedly, some Senators who signed the letter believe it’s an easy way to symbolically signal solidarity with their progressive base without actually needing to deliver anything. But that view is a miscalculation: the progressive base expects action from those who say they support the public option. A signature on a letter is not enough, and the people who are following this issue understand it well enough to know that the only thing worse than a Democratic Senator who publicly opposes the public option is a Democratic Senator who publicly claims to support the public option, but privately doesn’t do anything to pass it into law.

Join the discussion in ericlewis0’s recommended diary, 5 More Senators for PO – Total Now 30! updated with ACTION.

What if you had served nearly two decades in Congress — most of the them in the U.S. Senate — and your greatest accomplishment was helping kill the public option?

If you fit that description, you really shouldn’t be surprised face a primary challenge. You shouldn’t be surprised at all.

(By the way, while Lincoln was taking to the Senate floor in Washington, DC to fight against the public option, Bill Halter was in Little Rock, working with the National Association of Free Clinics to help support the efforts of Countdown viewers to donate free access to medical care for the people of his state.)

Contribute to Bill Halter
Bill Halter for Senate
Volunteer

Among the issues that’s caused the most Republican whining today (and all week, really) has been the insistence that the threat of using the reconciliation process is somehow out of bounds. First it was the nonsense that reconciliation was the “nuclear option,” though it’s not. Now it’s just a sort of generalized complaint that it’s a cheap way to avoid a filibuster.

Well, there’s nothing cheap about it, of course. It’s actually considerably more difficult to do things in compliance with the rules and current practice under reconciliation than it would be under regular order. But yes, the statutory time limit on debate for reconciliation bills (which is what protects them from filibusters) is a decent trade for having to severely limit what fixes can be made to the health insurance reform bill that’s already passed the Senate.

But if the process is really the major sticking point the Republicans are making it out to be, why not ask Senators at the summit straight up whether they’ll commit to allowing an up-or-down vote on the bill? Ask them right to their faces and on TV whether reconciliation is really the problem, and if Democrats agree not to use it, whether they’ll let the Congress vote on this bill or not?

That’s something they can agree to on the Senate floor by unanimous consent. You can agree on a time limit for debate and everything, and just agree as colleagues — as they used to do for almost every bill that ever came to the floor in the Senate, ever — how long they’ll work on the bill for, and when they’ll vote on it.

You can just… agree to it. No magic. No arcane process. You just say how long you want to work on the bill, and if everyone agrees, that’s how long you’ll work on it, after which, you’ll vote. And if Republicans win the debate and have more votes, they win. If Democrats do, then Dems win.

Ask them that. They’ll say no. We all know it. But if there’s one thing having the TV cameras there can do for you, it’s put this one basic, fundamental thing in focus: Republicans just flat refuse let Congress vote.

So what’s really “nuclear” around here, anyway?

UPDATE: If you’re interested, I had an exchange via Twitter on this point with former Bush White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto. Mostly civil. But like far too many on this particular point of procedure (sometimes on both sides of the aisle, Tony conflates the full Senate-passed health insurance reform bill with the small, narrowly tailored package of changes designed to be passed under reconciliation procedures. If you blur the lines between the two, you can argue for people who don’t know the difference that “the health care bill” can’t go through reconciliation, because it’s not exclusively budget-related. But for one thing, the bill destined for reconciliation is budget-related. And for another, that just leaves us with the question the media should ask anyone who protests the process: “If the Democrats bring the bill under reconciliation and the Republicans can raise points of order against it, then what rules are being broken here that makes you say it’s the ‘nuclear option?’”

The reason it’s a good question is that the answer is: None. No rules are being broken. It’s not the nuclear option, and you look like an idiot for saying it is.

Hannity’s claim has absolutely no basis in reality. In fact, Reid, Obama, and Clinton did not oppose the use of reconciliation, the process through which major Bush initiatives such as his tax cuts and higher education reform were passed. The senators were actually speaking out against a Republican effort to eliminate the filibuster in the middle of a session of the U.S. Senate. It had nothing to do with reconciliation, which was used twice in 2005 without any objections from Reid, Obama, or Clinton.

At least when right-wingers try to rename reconciliation the nuclear option, they can claim not to be lying, because nuclear option doesn’t have a formal definition. But reconciliation does. There’s no ambiguity. Hannity wasn’t telling the truth, and he knows it. His claim wasn’t just false, it was a lie.

By Michael J.W. StickingsI’m not sure I agree with Glenn Greenwald that the absence of the public option in the White House’s new health-care reform compromise is proof of Obama’s opposition to the public option:It now seems obvious that White House’s …

Tom Carper has backed off the statement that he expected to sign on to the public option via reconciliation letter, which I posted on earlier. He says he thought the question was about another letter, one that rumored a few weeks ago that never materialized, that would assure the House that the Senate would fix the hcr bill via reconciliation. He’s apparently not on the memo list.

Chris Bowers has an udpate on where his count stands:

We have been counting votes here on Open Left. With the addition of Senator Inoyue this morning, there are now 25 Senators on the record as favoring passing a public option through reconciliation…. Six are opposed, and six others are likely supporters.

It is true that there are not enough Senators on record to pass the public option at this time. However, there are also not enough opponents on the public record to rule it out. For the public option to truly be dead, ten Democratic Senators have to state that they will never vote for it under any circumstances. That hasn’t happened.

The House Dems have announced their summit attendees: Reps. Xavier Becerra (CA), Louise Slaughter (NY), Rob Andrews (NJ) and Jim Cooper (TN). Andrews has been prominent in opposition to the excise tax; Cooper is the Blue Dogs’ representative; Becerra is a strong progressive, and Slaughter is Rules Committee chair. As of yet, I haven’t been able to find a list of the House Republicans expected to attend. Boehner has said Republican House members will attend. “We shouldn’t let the White House have a six-hour, taxpayer-funded infomercial on Obama care…. We need to show up. We need to crash the party.”

The Senate Dems attending will be: Sens. Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, Max Baucus, Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, Jay Rockefeller and Kent Conrad. Republicans will send Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl,, Lamar Alexander, Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, John McCain, Tom Coburn, and John Barrasso. There’s a team to inspire some bipartisanship, eh?

Details of the summit are emerging. It will run from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., EST.

1. Discussion:

a. The President will offer opening comments, followed by Republican and Democratic Members chosen by their colleagues.
b. They’ll then move to discussions around four themes:
i Controlling costs – introduced by the President
ii. Insurance reforms – introduced by Secretary Sebelius
iii. Reducing the deficit – introduced by the Vice President
iv. Expanding coverage – introduced by the President

1. Logistics:

a. Participants will be seated at tables in a hollow square setup. They’ll be identified with name cards.
b. There will be a leadership staff walk-through on Wednesday afternoon.

They’ll get a break for a buffet lunch.

And, finally, Reid reminds Republicans about reconciliation (they’re going to start calling it the “Nuclear Option”):

“I’ve been told that my Republican friends are lamenting reconciliation, but I would recommend for them to go back and look at history,” Reid said.

“Since 1981, reconciliation has been used 21 times. The vast majority of those reconciliation efforts have been by Republicans,” he said. “[T]hey should stop crying about reconciliation as if it’s never been done before. It’s done almost every Congress, and they’re the ones that used it more than anyone else.”

He added, “The Contract for America, most of the stuff in the Contract for America was done with reconciliation. Tax cuts, done with reconciliation. Medicare, done with reconciliation. So they better go back and look at history a little bit.”

So, the question of the public option’s priority for the White House seems to finally be put to rest.

Gibbs said flatly that the White House doesn’t believe there’s enough support in Congress to get it passed.

Asked directly whether the President’s failure to include the public option in his proposal means he views the public option as dead, Gibbs didn’t exactly dispute this interpretation.

“There are some that are supportive of this,” Gibbs said. But he added: “There isn’t enough political support in the majority to get this through.”

“The President took the Senate bill as the base and looks forward to discussing consensus ideas on Thursday,” Gibbs added, presumably meaning that the public option is not a consensus idea.

It’s unclear why Gibbs is deciding in advance that there isn’t enough support to pass this idea. Momentum has been gathering for days. It’s also very likely that it would continue to gain steam if Obama racks up a victory at the summit and Dems press forward with plans to pass reform themselves via reconciliation.

But Gibbs’s statement seems likely, willfully or not, to slow that momentum in advance.

Plenty of folks in the Senate seem to think otherwise. Twenty-three as of now, including leadership members Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez, who have signed onto the Bennet letter. The White House might have just thrown a bucket of cold water over all of them. Which will make Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson very happy.

Here’s the response from Progressive Change Campaign co-founder Adam Green, via e-mail:

The White House obviously has a loser mentality — but America rallies around winners. Polls show that in state after state, voters hate the Senate bill and overwhelmingly want a public option, even if passed with zero Republican votes. More than 50 Senate Democrats and 218 House Democrats were willing to vote for the public option before, and the only way to lose in reconciliation is if losers are leading the fight. That’s why Democrats in Congress should ignore the White House and follow those like Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez who know that the public option is a political and policy winner.”

The PCCC, Democracy for America, and Credo Action continue to put thousands of calls into senators  here. In the last 7 days, the numbers of senators on board went from 0 to 23 – see WhipCongress.com.

As of this morning, the total stands at 23, with powerful Appropriations chair Sen. Daniel Inouye signing on to the public option/reconciliation letter.

The bad news is, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, perhaps unduly affected by the retirement of Evan Bayh, has a problem with using reconciliation to get the public option, saying it would be too partisan.

“I don’t think the timing of it is very good,” the West Virginia Democrat said on Monday. “I’m probably not going to vote for that, although I’m strongly for the public option, because I think it creates, at a time when we really need as much bipartisan[ship] … as possible. “

Rockefeller added: “I don’t think you [pursue] something like the public option, which cannot pass, will not pass. And if we get the Senate bill–both through the medical loss ratio and the national plans, which have in that, every one of them has to have one not-for-profit plan, which is sort of like a public option.”

It’s not even entirely clear that he will support reconciliation period. Brian Beutler speculates that Rockefeller could be holding out in deference to the summit, since he will be one of the attendees. It is, however, a sobering reminder for all of us on exactly what being “strongly for the public option” really means to these Senators. Being for it in theory is not going to be enough, and signing on to a letter is easy. Working your colleagues and pressuring leadership isn’t, but it’s what has to happen to keep the momentum going. The more Senators who sign, the easier that task becomes.