Sam Brownback: “We were on the floor in December, the longest continuous session in the history of the Senate, 25 continuous days, and…”

“We were on the floor in December, the longest continuous session in the history of the Senate, 25 continuous days, and we were talking about this and my colleague from Nebraska and I were joined by our colleague from Utah, Senator Hatch, who has been around a long time and part of a lot of health care reform legislation. His point is, if you follow the normal order and work it through a committee and bipartisan process, almost every health care bill he has been a part of--and there have been a number of substantial ones--gets 75 votes in this body. People want to support health care reform on a good bill. They will support it. It will be bipartisan. We are all for health care. But now you have a bill that is going to be completely partisan, on one side, not supported by the American public, and then you are having to jimmy rig a process to try to figure out how we set this up to do it. Even Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Budget Committee, who is a Democrat, says: Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform. It won't work. It won't work because it was never designed for that kind of significant legislation. My experience is, if you try to do something that is not designed to do this, you are going to get a flawed product and flawed process that people are going to be mad about. It will hurt this body. I think it will be very harmful to this country to do this and it should not be done.”