Senate majority leader offers a way to avoid weekend work on appropriations

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., dangling the chance of a free weekend, wants to move off healthcare reform early next week and take up a nearly $450 billion fiscal 2010 appropriations "minibus" spending package with Republican consent.

If Republicans object, as seems likely, Reid said he will keep the Senate in session this weekend for required procedural votes on the spending legislation.

Reid's gambit is part of an increasingly tough effort to approve health care and a series of year-end measures before Christmas.

Noting that the spending bill is likely to come over from the House on Thursday, Reid said, "We can move to that with a simple majority vote. And then if I file cloture on it tomorrow, we would have a Saturday cloture vote. Thirty hours after that, sometime Sunday morning, we would have a vote on the conference report."

Reid said he suggested to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., "that it would probably be in everyone's interest if we allowed people to go home for the weekend and arrive at the same end, rather than going through all the procedural gyrations."

A GOP leadership aide said Wednesday evening that Republican agreement is unlikely because it would require unanimous consent. "All it takes is one senator," the aide said.

Democrats are waiting for CBO to score a compromise health proposal that would drop a national public option, but permit the Office of Personnel Management to negotiate private plans and allow some people 55 to 64 years old to buy into Medicare.

Senators said the CBO score will not be ready before next week, and Reid hopes to use time until then to take up the spending bill. But Democratic senators and aides said they expect Republicans to resist that course because agreement makes passing health care easier.

The spending bill is attached to a conference report and is privileged, but because provisions were added in conference, it is subject to challenges by points of order, which Republicans could use to prolong floor consideration.

Reid hopes to soon craft a manager's amendment to the health measure, including the compromises on the public option and, potentially, abortion coverage. He could then file cloture on the amendment next week, setting up the first of three cloture votes needed to pass the bill.

Democratic leadership aides have said Reid would have to file cloture this week to pass the healthcare bill by Christmas, but a Reid spokesman insisted that target remains reachable.

Democrats seem focused on winning two votes from a group that includes Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and, to a lesser extent, Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Democrats need to appease Lieberman on the public option and Nelson on both that issue and abortion restrictions.

Nelson said Wednesday that in regular meetings, Reid "hasn't even asked" for a commitment on the bill.

"What we've been talking about is specifics, how to do this, or how to do something else," Nelson said. He did not elaborate, saying he did not want to discuss "stuff that's talked about that may not materialize."

On abortion, he said there "is a lot of discussion of how to keep ... the principle of the House version with different language," but he said he didn't know if that was possible.

Nelson said he will not take a position on the provisions sent to CBO until scores come back.

Sens. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., whose support has been in question, appear more firmly in the "yes" column. Both touted the bill's benefits for small businesses in a briefing Wednesday.

Lincoln described the role envisioned for OPM in administering private plans as addressing her opposition to a public option.

"It's private industry," Lincoln said. "It takes the best of both worlds ... Government creates an environment where private industry can operate."

Senate Democrats emerged from a Caucus meeting Wednesday evening with no details to share from a meeting on the compromise sent to CBO. Nelson said the 10 senators who negotiated the provisions did not share specifics with other senators.

"Until we get CBO [scores] back, anything that we say begins to gin up people that draw up the wrong conclusion or twist it into something that it isn't, and I don't think that serves anybody's purposes," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "So I think it's just much better to get CBO's verdict and then we can make some judgments."

Anna Edney contributed to this report.