Controversial Health Care Tactic; Powerless After the Storm
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, guys. Well, welcome to Monday. Nothing like starting the week off with a steaming hot cup of "Broken Government." If you don't have a job and you needed that helping hand from Uncle Sam, guess what? Time and money have run out. And the message from the senator blocking it, tough</s>KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Kyra, you're right. A rescue operation is now under way. Only 10 minutes ago, firefighters here said that they heard tapping from inside a 15-story building. A 15- story building that simply fell on its side. As I say, firefighters have heard that tapping. I'm going to step out of the way and so you can see them -- you can see where they're working now, and they're working in those holes. And they have got firefighters inside the building. The next phase is -- according to the head of the firefighter's team is that they will drill some small holes, possibly no larger than an inch so that they can get a small camera or can get some eye contact into what they say is Apartment 602. Now they say that Apartment 602, according to the records that they have, there could be up to three people inside that apartment, and so that they say is good news, because they say potentially there are another 40 or 50 people inside that building, and right now they have no clue as to whether they are alive or dead -- Kyra.</s>PHILLIPS: Karl Penhaul, please keep us updated. We want to follow those rescue efforts live, of course, and get as much information as we can by the minute. Karl, thanks so much. Well, this is what it looks like and sounds like when an 8.8 quake hits, when every second feels like an eternity. Someone was recording this as it happened. We've got several seconds where all you can see is the shaking. Then all of a sudden the video goes black when the power fails. Take a listen. As you can see the lights are out. No matter what the language, fear needs no translation here. One man urging others just to stay calm. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be delivering condolences to the Chilean government tomorrow. She's scheduled a Latin American trip just before the quake had struck. She arrives in Santiago Tuesday and will meet with the outgoing president and the president- elect. You can visit our "Impact Your World" page to find out more about the quake and how you can help with the relief effort. That's at CNN.com/impact. Webster's defines reconciling as restoring to harmony. Well, leave it to the politics to turn a positive word into a negative. So bottom line here, Democrats want to use the reconciliation procedure to pass health care reform without a GOP filibuster. Republicans, outraged.</s>REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE SPEAKER: We know that one of the reasons we didn't have a bill in the fall was because the president wanted to give the Senate more time to arrive at bipartisanship in the Senate bill which he thought might be possible then. The House had said right from the start they were never going to vote for any bill, but he thought there was some prospects in the Senate. And so what we've had is a year of trying to strive for bipartisanship. As I said, over 100 Republican amendments in the bill, and the Republicans placed their own bill on the floor here in the House, which insured three million, and our bill insured over 30 million. So we have a different value system here.</s>CANDY CROWLEY, CNN HOST, "STATE OF THE UNION": Is there any way the president can reconfigure this bill that would get your support?</s>SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY), MINORITY LEADER: I don't think so, Candy. I mean this is a massive overhaul of one-sixth of the economy. Republicans just don't believe that a half a trillion dollar in Medicare cuts and a half-trillion dollars in new taxes and possibly higher insurance premiums for all of those on the individual market is the definition of reform.</s>PHILLIPS: So how exactly would this reconciliation tactic work? Ed Henry, what's the president's next step?</s>ED HENRY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kyra, you know how on Wall Street they say markets love certainty? It's the same for presidents and congressional leaders. They want to know when they're proposing a legislation they can get this done. But this health care debate has been full of just the opposite -- uncertainty for the last year. I think the only thing really we're certain about right now is that this president does not have the super majority of 60 votes to pass his health care plan in the Senate. So that is why he's very likely to resort to reconciliation. This legislative tactic that you mentioned where you just need a simple majority of 51 in the Senate. For example, we're told by top White House aides that the president later this week is likely to lay out what they're calling a way forward here. They won't say yet that he's going to use reconciliation. But that's pretty much his last resort here in this long debate. And I thought the most telling part of the Sunday shows yesterday was the fact that David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press" was asking Nancy Andrew Carl the health care is already here at the White House three different times, do you have the votes for reconciliation right now? And she kept saying we will have the votes. She was basically ducking it. That tells me they know inside this White House they do not even have a simple majority, let alone a super majority right now. And that tell us they still have a lot of work to do just to get it through with a simple majority, which may wind up to be controversial -- Kyra.</s>PHILLIPS: Well, Ed, so how much backlash can Democrats expect if they move forward with reconciliation?</s>HENRY: Well, look, there's no doubt the Republicans -- and you played some of the sound there from Mitch McConnell and others who were telling Candy Crowley that they're going to kick up a big storm about this. That they believe this is sort of outside the mainstream, outside the normal order of things. But when you really look at what's happened in, say, the last 30 years, it turns out Republican presidents have used this tactic of reconciliation a lot more than Democrats. They say they haven't done it on a major issue like health care, but they have done it on a major issue like tax cuts in the last Bush administration. Something that was also dividing the parties in a big way. And so I think the bottom line is that the Republicans are going to be screaming a lot about this. They already have been. But I think the Democrats are going to point out correctly that this has been used by Republicans more in the past than it has been by Democrats. And it's clear this is the president's top domestic priority. They're going to use every tactic they can to get it done. But again they don't have the votes yet even if they use that tactic. They have a lot of work to do to get this finished -- Kyra.</s>PHILLIPS: Yes, and Americans want it finished, that's for sure. Ed, thanks. And President Obama is shifting his focus from health care next hour. He is talking about plans to improve the nation's schools. We'll have his remarks right here live in the CNN NEWSROOM. It's March and spring is just a few weeks out. Probably it feels like it'll never come for some people like the people who've gone about a week now without electricity. It's too much for even winter tough Maine.</s>JACQUI JERAS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: And I'm CNN meteorologist Jacqui Jeras. Unfortunately that storm still not over. It's clipping New England today. Find out the latest on that system and what it can do to your afternoon hours today. Plus a new storm in Texas which may bring some chances of snow to areas in the south. That's all coming up in just a minute.