This weekend Washington is abuzz about one thing alone — health care. Mr. Obama is making a personal visit to Capitol Hill to meet with his party’s House members this afternoon to wrangle together the remaining votes for the bill Congressional Democrats are increasingly sure they will pass Sunday. (That’s on top of meetings and telephone calls with 64 members of Congress, Robert Gibbs boasted Thursday.)
Late Friday evening, lawmakers struggled to make a deal over controversial restrictions on abortion after a day spent reassuring rank-and-file members that the cuts to Medicare are for the best.
Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, who is leading the fight for stricter language on abortion, will announce their decision in a news conference at 11 a.m. The Times’s Carl Hulse has his weekly national address on the financial regulatory reform the Senate Banking Committee will take up on Monday.
“Now, I have long been a vigorous defender of free markets,” Mr. Obama said, praising the bill. “But what we have seen over the past two years is that without reasonable and clear rules to check abuse and protect families, markets don’t function freely. In fact, it was just the opposite. In the absence of such rules, our financial markets spun out of control, credit markets froze, and our economy nearly plummeted into a second Great Depression.”
If nights haven’t been long enough on Capitol Hill recently, members of the banking committee might have a few more ahead of them as the panel’s chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, powers through the 359 filed amendments before Congress breaks March 26, The Times’s Sewell Chan writes.
In the Pipe: The White House is so focused on what happens after the health care bill passes that they’ve prepared a public relations campaign to reshape soured attitudes about the bill. Supportive outside groups have their own promotion scheme and are considering creating a new nonprofit organization to orchestrate their message, The Wall Street Journal reports.
From the GOP: In the Republicans’ weekly address, House Minority Leader John Boehner does indeed talk about health care.
“Fourteen months ago that President Obama took the oath of office with a promise to govern from the center,” said the Ohio Republican. “Unfortunately, President Obama and Democrats in Washington chose a partisan path and a costly, big-government agenda.”
“This bill requires 10 years of tax increases and 10 years of Medicare cuts just to pay for six years of supposed benefits, many of which don’t even go into effect until 2014,” he, said reiterating that he would demand a roll call vote Sunday, forcing each lawmaker to vocalize his vote. “That’s not reform.”
Public Option Resurfaces: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is clearly feeling a bit remorseful that a government-run plan didn’t make it into the final bill. He wrote a letter to Senators Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, promising to vote separately on the public option “in the coming months.”
On the Margin: While waging the campaign for health care legislation — his top domestic agenda — Mr. Obama has not spoken much on what is going on beyond our borders, writes The Times’s Peter Baker. For example, Mr. Obama has not once mentioned that last month troops marching into the Marja region of Afghanistan opened the largest military operation of his presidency.
Anti-War Protest: At noon a collection of antiwar groups will march from Lafayette Park to the offices of Halliburton, a large defense contractor, The Washington Post, Mortgage Bankers Association of America, the National Endowment for Democracy, a military recruitment center and the Department of Veterans Affairs , demanding the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq.