A top House Democratic staffer just told me the reconciliation bill, with some surprises, and a tentative CBO score will be posted on the House Rules web site late tonight or early tomorrow morning.  Then a final CBO score will be posted Friday.  The Rules Committee will meet Friday to mark up the rule.  Then the House will vote on the rule Saturday, engage in perhaps four hours of debate, and, later Saturday, take the final vote on the reconciliation bill, which will deem the passage of the Senate bill. 

This morning's paper carries an op-ed criticizing health care reform primarily on the grounds that it will cost too much. It urges that the plan be sharply scaled back so that it will get bipartisan support.

If this op-ed were written by a Republican member of Congress it would be unremarkable; not even worth publishing. But this particular op-ed was authored by someone who appears to have meaningful expertise on the subject. The writer, Tom Scully, is identified as the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a White House official during the George H.W. Bush administration.

I wonder if the Founding Fathers envisioned that this sentence (highlighted in bold, courtesy of Harold Meyerson's column in today's Washington Post) would become so commonplace:

The civil rights leaders who have called this march don't doubt that if Obama could enact immigration reform by executive order, he would. In his meeting with them last Thursday, the president affirmed his commitment to the cause. Whether it will become his legislative priority is another question: Congress is waiting to see what Obama does, even as Obama says he needs to see some GOP willingness to enact reform (and this is certainly a cause that some leading Republicans, most notably John McCain, have supported in the past).

Why should Congress wait to see what Obama does?  Congress should do.  Obama should sign, or not.  When you march on Washington, you should be facing east from the Washington Monument, not north.

And he says in National Journal that a value-added tax is on the horizon.

There's nothing really new in Clive's column.  Bruce has been saying that a VAT is logical for a long time.  And among many others, I've been saying that the deficit isn't just a spending problem.

But the fact that Clive is now willing to go where others have boldly gone before is an important indication that the public debate is now changing and that a tax increase is becoming a topic for polite conversation.  It might not yet inevitable but it's definitely becoming more acceptable.

As you read the following from noted congressional expert Norm Ornstein, keep in mind that he's no Democratic apologist or spinmeister.  Norm is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an organization no one could possibly mistake for an arm of the Democratic  Party.  I'm reprinting the whole thing so no one can accuse me of selectively quoting from Norm's piece.

Hypocrisy: A Parliamentary Procedure

Earlier this month, Nancy Rosenblum, the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Government and Chair of the Department of Government at Harvard, visited the Rockefeller Center and delivered a public lecture on the moral distinctiveness of political party identity.  She is both contrarian and clever in the way she takes apart self-styled "independents," who let their self-styled independence of thought remove any consequence they might have in electoral politics if they remain independent from their fellow voters.  She makes the affirmative case for ambitious political parties as sources of morality in politics.

The video is definitely worth your time.  For more, see her full explanation in On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.

My column from today's Roll Call explains why, contrary to what some may think, the fact that health care reform meets the Paygo rules of the congressional budget process is a reason to vote for rather than against the bill.

PAYGO Is Not a Reason to Oppose Health Care Reform

March 16, 2010

Pay-as-you-go, or PAYGO, is what supposedly forces Congress to offset the cost of doing something new so that it doesn’t make the deficit worse. For the past two decades, PAYGO either was a formal part of the Congressional budget process or, when it expired, was something many immediately and vehemently insisted be reinstated. Editorials promoted it. Budget hawks demanded it. Political parties tried to show it was one of their basic tenets. Democrats and Republicans both supported it.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

March 15, 2010

Today, Moody's Investors Service, a bond rating company, issued a warning about the the federal debt. I couldn't get access to the complete report, but following is the press release. BB

London, 15 March 2010 -- The ratings of all Aaa governments are currently well positioned despite their stretched finances, says Moody's Investors Service in the third issue of its quarterly Aaa Sovereign Monitor.

Moody's new report provides an update about the situation of the four largest Aaa governments -- Germany, France, the UK and the US -- as well as other selected Aaa countries: Spain and the less fiscally challenged Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. In its examination of these countries' unchanged creditworthiness, Moody's identifies the key challenges facing them.