Toomey for Senate

Sen. Arlen Specter says he will support a parliamentary maneuver to push revised health-care legislation through the Senate, a step that he said last year would be a "colossal mistake."

Specter and at least 22 other Democratic senators have signed a letter urging Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) to bring health-care changes to a vote under budget reconciliation rules. That approach allows bills to pass with a simple majority of 51 votes instead of the 60 it takes to cut off a filibuster in the Senate.

"This is yet another in a long list of cynical 180-degree reversals for Arlen Specter," Republican Pat Toomey, the former congressman who is seeking to unseat Specter, said yesterday.

Specter countered that he had left the door open to using reconcilation as a "last, last resort," and argued that legislative gridlock on health care made it necessary.

Specter, who was a Republican until switching to the Democratic Party last spring, is running for a sixth term and faces a primary challenge from Rep. Joe Sestak.

"We have gone through a long, torturous process of about a year," Specter said in an interview yesterday. "It's important - millions without coverage, insurance companies raising premiums, the ban on coverage of preexisting conditions." He said the requirement of a supermajority to limit debate should not be "concrete to stop us from governing."

Negotiations over a compromise health-care bill that could win approval in both houses of Congress stalled in January after the election of Sen. Scott Brown (R., Mass.) deprived Democrats of a filibuster-proof majority. Now, Reid and other Democrats are talking about using reconciliation to pass legislation, a move that some Republicans call the "nuclear option."

Specter said he had "done a lot more research and found that reconciliation has been used some 22 times in analogous circumstances."

The procedure has been used to ease the passage of major legislation, including COBRA, which allows employees to continue health benefits when they lose jobs; the SCHIP children's health-insurance program; and the 1996 overhaul of the national welfare system.

Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) believes reconciliation should be an option if needed, his spokesman said.

Republicans argue that using reconciliation to pass the Democrats' health-care overhaul would be an unfair attempt to thwart the will of the voters, who, they say, have rejected the plan.

Specter told bloggers on a Tuesday conference call that voters wanted to see Congress move forward on a big issue. He added, according to the Web site PoliticsPA, that most people "won't really understand the technicalities and nuances" of the parliamentary rules.

That attitude is "condescending and arrogant," Toomey said. "The public knows it doesn't want a multitrillion-dollar takeover of health care."

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