“For the moment, the public focus is on the House’s ’self-executing rule,’ an effort by House Democrats to get around voting on the unpopular Senate health care bill. Under that back-bend, members would vote on a 100-page House bill of popular fixes to the roughly 2,000-page Senate bill. Passage of this smaller bill would automatically ‘deem’ that the larger Senate bill had passed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she is leaning toward this approach because no one would have to actually vote on a bill he or she doesn’t like (one of the impediments she faces as she tries to line up the 216 votes she needs to pass health care legislation). But House Democrats aren’t going through all this just out of cowardice. Part of what is requiring them to be so creative is the unpredictability of the coming reconciliation process in the Senate.” (03/16/10)