Could The Republicans Stall The Health Care Bill For Infinity

Keith Hennessey has one of the more interesting political blogs. He was an important person in the Bush administration and always has fun and informative posts on the whole "process"

Here he discusses the numerous challenges it will be to pass the Heath Care Bill. See Challenges of the two bill strategy

Now he mentions something that he is not endorsing and neither am I. However what we are seeing the Democrats do and proposing is dangerous.

It is very much like Nuclear war. You think you can have a tactical exchange but before you know it you have destroyed the Earth. What becomes unthinkable becomes at that moment sane . You think you can control it but you cannot. The scenario below usually would not happened because Members would go eat and drink together in back rooms and cooler heads would prevail. Now since we are all "Good Govt" and find that distasteful we don't have that detente.

Here is one doomsday scenario he mentions which wonders how the heck we would govern afterwards

The Senate’s vote-a-rama
I have few legacies in Washington, but one is that I coined the term vote-a-rama as a young Senate Budget Committee staffer in 1995.

Senate floor debate on a reconciliation bill is limited to 20 hours. There is no limit on amendments that can be offered. This means that, after two full days of debate and amendments, twenty hours will have expired. Any amendments which are queued up (or are then offered) are then voted on, in sequence, with no debate (in theory). In practice the Senators will often agree to precede each vote with 30 seconds of debate from the proponent and 30 seconds from an opponent.

For a normal reconciliation bill, there are anywhere from 15 to 60 amendments stacked up. Assume 15 minutes per vote when the Senate is working at top speed. The Senate spends many hours in a seemingly endless series of stacked votes. This is called the vote-a-rama.

The Senate floor is usually mostly empty. When things are really busy there might be eight or ten Senators and twice that many staff on the floor.

During the vote-a-rama you have 100 Senators and about the same number of staff on the Senate floor or in the cloakrooms for anywhere from four to fifteen or more consecutive hours.
A well-disciplined Senate majority party can defeat every amendment with a simple majority by simply voting to table (kill) each amendment. This has a slightly different procedural and political feel than defeating the amendment but the same practical effect.

Still, the minority can often use the vote-a-rama to force members of the majority party to take politically tough votes. I would expect vulnerable Senate Democrats to be looking to vote with Republicans on some of these votes to avoid political risks for their campaign. This should not be too big of a challenge for Leader Reid, since he needs to hold only 50 of 59 for each tabling vote. He can allow vulnerable individual Democrats to take a walk on particularly difficult amendments.

The novel twist this time would be the possibility of a Senate Republican filibuster by amendment during the vote-a-rama. Even a single Republican could, in theory, offer an infinite sequence of amendments to each word of the bill, never allowing Leader Reid to get to final passage.

This has never happened. Even in times of extreme partisan stress over highly contentious reconciliation bills, the minority has forced a handful or two of tough votes and then allowed the reconciliation bill to move to final passage. But in sixteen years I have never seen the reconciliation process placed under as much stress as is suggested by this strategy.
This provokes two questions to which I do not know the answer:

If Senate Republicans continue to press their argument that use of reconciliation is abusive in this case, will they avail themselves of this tool?

Does Leader Reid have a procedural option to shut it down? I will guess his staff are exploring options for a ruling by the chair to shut down such a sequence if the Chair (controlled by Reid) determines the extended sequence of amendments is dilatory.
This is another area where I know only the questions.

Fun stuff in a way for political junkies but this also shows a danger of collateral damage after a health care bill fight that people need to think about.

We shall see if the doctrine of MAD (Mutually assured Destruction) prevents this.