Will Obama Lose The Health Care Bill Over Stupak?

Much of the day-after health care bill coverage has focused on the GOP Senators (and Joe Lieberman) who intend to stall the bill in the Senate unless the public option is removed. However yesterday on Meet the Press Rachel Maddow was the only panelist who took the time to note how the Stupak amendment, the last-minute add-on which restricts funding for abortion unless it’s the result of rape or incest, might complicate things for President Obama going forward. Says Maddow (video below):

I think that the, the, the big, the big issue obviously is that the House got it done, in the big — in the broadest possible terms. I do think that going ahead, looking toward the Senate, there is a bit of a poison pill in there for progressives and liberals, especially if they’re counting on there being a big electoral boon to Democrats…from having passed this. And that’s that abortion provision, the Stupak amendment, is going to be really…

It’s, it’s the biggest restriction on abortion funding since the Hyde Amendment. It’s the biggest restriction on abortion access in this country in, in, in a generation. And if, if it took a Democratic president, 60 percent majorities in the House and Senate of Democrats in order to get that, I think you can expect Democratic women to sit on their hands at least if not revolt if that doesn’t get taken out in conference.

Of course, there is a strong chance the Stupak amendment was actually included with the silent presumption on the Dem’s part that it will never make it through the Senate, a theory Sarah Palin also noted in less than thrilled terms in her recent Facebook post: “Now we can only hope that Rep. Stupak’s amendment will hold in the final bill, though the Democratic leadership has already refused to promise that it won’t be scrapped later.”

Perhaps Obama and Pelosi merely crossed their fingers that the blow would be cushioned by news that the bill was passed at all. The more likely result, however, is that the administration has just lengthened their list of opponents to include a lot of women’s groups who were initially slow to come to come over to Obama in the first place and arguably still feeling the sting of Hillary’s loss. Get ready, it’s going to be a long slog to Christmas.

** Side note: NBC deserves some sort of award for not only making their clips available as quickly as they do, and making them embeddable (AHEM, ABCNews!), but for creating a system which allows the viewer to clip what they want, based on the transcript even, and then provides the embed code. This is how it is done!