takes at least a few months. then the committee has what they call a mark-up of the bill in which all of the members of the committee both parties are allowed to offer amendments and get votes on those amendments to the bill. and then that bill, final version of it, is voted out of the committee and then brought to the senate floor and then the majority leader calls for debate on the senate floor of the bill that came out of the committee and oont he n the senate floor, everyone gives their unanimous consent to debate the bill and it is debated on the senate floor and amended on the senate floor and there is a final bill on the senate floor. that is what regular order is. and what i just described usually takes about nine months. least on a complex health care legislation like this. that is what senators mean when they say regular order. when john mccain said last week it was time to return to regular order on health care legislation, that seemed to me would he vote against the bill
nominations today. congratulations on your emmy nomination, lawrence. one little one. two, and two at 8 wi:00. great night it embarrasses me to talk about that stuff. you are much bet are. john mccain is now this, i don t know, this mysterious figure. he gave a speech this afternoon that indicated he couldn t vote for anything that mitch mcconnell would bring to the floor. but tonight he did vote with mcconnell but you could argue that it was only a procedural vote, that it wasn t technically on the substance. but what he meant personally about how he is going to conduct himself in the health care votes is not as clear as it sounded this afternoon. no. i think that s the right way it put it. i think that speech sort of stood alone. i m not sure that it was even a predictor of his own behavior, let alone of any other republican senator s behavior.
consent. and unanimous consent to the bill. no one was afraid of debating bills. that is technically a vote, but it happened to fast that no one even noticed it. senator john mccain was in the senate in 1994 when hillary clinton s extremely controversial health security act was debated on the senate floor and john mccain, like every other republican senator, gave his unanimous consent to the motion to proceed to debate on that bill. knowing that they were all opposed to the actual bill. it was a motion that no one in the senate even noticed had occurred. it was mitch mcconnell who created today s dramatic moment in the senate. which led to john mccain s most dramatic vote of his career on health care. mitch mcconnell became the minority leader and he introduced the tactic of refusing to give unanimous consent to proceed to debate on
the vote they took a few moments ago, the vote they took tonight, 60-vote threshold on that. they knew they wouldn t get anywhere near 60 votes. that was a free spin as to who voted on it. senator mccain voted yes, voted with mitch mcconnell on that. that is not what it sounded like he was going to do when he gave that moving speech today. so i don t know what we do with that. this was a vote to basically override the budget rules on the senate floor to allow them to have proceed a vote on this bill that is the mcconnell bill plus the cruz edig to tedition to th mcconnell deal and the port addition to that. there is the most generous concepts advanced by the republicans. and they lost ten republicans on this vote. yeah, and even with the generous provisions, kind of