Congressman Fattah: You may have to have a bifurcated approach strategically.
On one level, for instance, you could pass the Senate bill in the House and send it to the President to sign. That's an option.
You could more likely take the agreement -- that is now being scored by the CBO, by the House, the Senate, and the White House that they've been working on for the last couple of weeks -- and moderate it, to whatever degree you need to get a 60th vote, but then come back to improve upon it in a different vehicle that could be a budget reconciliation vehicle or which you only need 50 plus one or 50 plus the Vice President's vote.
But the first thing that we have to do is that we have to understand that there was a 50-state election, in which Democrats were given the responsibility to pass a comprehensive health care reform. And even if there was an election yesterday, in one state, that people want to read as sending someone to vote no on health care, we were all sent here to vote yes.
The Democrats don't have any reason if we are talking about respecting elections to respect one in Massachusetts and ignore the nationwide election a year ago.
Kathleen Wells: What were the voters in Massachusetts saying when they gave Scott Brown the victory?
Congressman Fattah: We have been here before. There was the Harris Wofford [election in which he] won the special election to replace Senator John Heinz in Pennsylvania. [Wofford] won on a health care mandate. Clinton won and then the following year, [working with] a nationwide health care reform mandate, they tried to move a [health care] bill. One of the first causalities [of that battle] was Harris Wofford. We lost his seat in Pennsylvania [to Republican Rick Santorum], and we had a 16- year setback in health care reform.
As the President always said, this is difficult work and there are going to be starts and stops.
When Clinton passed the assault weapons ban, there were Democratic members who acknowledged, when they were casting their vote, that they would likely lose their seat, but it saved lives.
When Clinton passed his economic plan, we got no Republican votes in the House or the Senate, but 25 million new jobs were created, and we balanced the Federal budget.
The Democratic Party received a mandate a year ago today and my only position is, notwithstanding the fact that Senator-elect Brown was elected, we have a responsibility to respect all of these elections, including our own.
Kathleen Wells: A year after President Obama put forth his agenda, Massachusetts voters are saying something with their votes. The Democrats can't ignore it, can they?
Congressman Fattah: We can't ignore it [but] there are about 100,000 or so votes separating Brown from Coakley out of more than 2 million cast, in a state in which everyone has health care insurance, in a plan that Senator-elect Brown voted for [as a state Senator] a government program that made sure that everyone in Massachusetts was insured.
To take from this election that somehow we should not find a way to cover 35 million people who don't have coverage, I think, would be intellectually dishonest.
Kathleen Wells: Comment on what the Massachusetts results say about the other parts of the President's agenda the job losses and his position regarding Wall Street.
Congressman Fattah: I think that the President, over his first year in office, has done an extraordinary job in the most difficult of circumstances.
