It's done. Obmama can drink a glass of champagne on the flight to Hawaii and members of the Senate can fly home for Christmas with puffed- out chest bragging they did it, they outmaneuvered the Republicans and garnered 60 votes to pass historic health care legislation.

The fight, which will be mostly for show, will move to the House after Jan. 1, when a conference is held and the House capitulates on the reforms that might have really made the bill historic.

The bill will help some people but not enough. It will be too expensive for many, and many of its benefits will still be years away. [More...]

The final hurdle to a full Senate vote on the health care bill was overcome today. WaPo has more here. The Senate will vote Xmas eve morning at 7 am.

Then it's off to Hawaii for President Obama and family, who postponed the trip a day so he would be in D.C. when the final vote is taken.

As to the health care bill, after it passes the Senate, it's on to the House-Senate conference in January where the bills will be reconciled.

Last week, Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA) reintroduced his Prisoner Abuse Remedies Act. As the New York Times opines today, this is a bill Congress needs to pass.

The culprit is the Prison Litigation Reform Act, (PLRA) passed under President Clinton in 1996. It was aimed at reducing frivolous lawsuits by prisoners, but due to its requirement that the prisoner sustained a physical injury and exhausted all administrative avenues before filing suit, it became a vehicle through which prisons and courts denied claims by inmates who were sodomized (finding no physical injury) and the victims of other conduct, such as "strip-searching of female prisoners by male guards; revealing to other inmates that a prisoner was H.I.V.-positive; forcing an inmate to stand naked for 10 hours."

Juveniles, who are most at risk in prison, often have the hardest time following through with the administrative hurdles. [More...]

Update: 1:17 am ET: The Dems get their 60 votes to limit debate. Yeas: 60, Neas: 40. The Yeas were 58 Dems and 2 Independents. The motion is agreed to.

Update: 1:10 am ET: The vote to limit debate on the Reid Manager's amendment is underway. They just wheeled Sen. Byrd in. The schedule if it passes:

• Tues: 7am: procedural vote
• Weds: 1pm procedural vote
• Thursday 7 pm - Final passage

The Senate will vote on the health care bill in an hour, at 1:00 a.m. ET. David Shuster will be anchoring live on MSNBC.

Debate has begun, you can watch it on C-span here. [More...]

House Democrats introduced an immigration reform bill today that provides a path to legalization for the undocumented. It's called the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 (CIR ASAP). In addition to some border security measures, it provides for:

• Improving Conditions of Detention:This section includes measures to:

Sen. Joe Lieberman says the Medicare buy-in and public option mean he's voting against the health care bill.

A Senate Democratic aide, flummoxed by Mr. Lieberman’s stance, said, “It was a total flip-flop and leaves us in a predicament as to what to do.”

What would it take for Lieberman to change his mind?

“You’ve got to take out the Medicare buy-in,” he said. “You’ve got to forget about the public option. You probably have to take out the Class Act [long term care provisions], which was a whole new entitlement program that will, in future years, put us further into deficit.”

Bump and Update: The Senate passed the $447 government funding bills as part of a $1.1 trillion total appropriations package. Some highlights are here.

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Sat. 12/12/09: The last hurdle was cleared today and the Senate will vote tomorrow on the $447 billion 2010 appropriations bill. The bill is composed of six separate measures.

Here's the one on crime funding. While there is prevention money in the bill, there's also a lot of funding for the War on Drugs.

Combating Illegal Drugs: $2 billion, $81 million above 2009, to combat illegal drugs through the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). These funds will provide for 128 new DEA positions to help stop the flow of illegal drugs across the Southwest border and to investigate, disrupt and dismantle major Mexican drug cartels.

The FBI does pretty well too, including lots of money for surveillance: [More...]

Lots of news sources are reporting a "broad agreement" has been reached in the Senate on health care.

The AP is further reporting (in an article with a time stamp two hours from now) that the agreement includes tossing the public option. Are they right?

Democratic senators say they have a tentative deal to drop a government-run insurance option from health care legislation. No further details were immediately available.

But liberals and moderates have been discussing an alternative, including a private insurance arrangement to be supervised by the federal agency that oversees the system through which lawmakers purchase coverage. Additionally, talks centered on opening up Medicare to uninsured Americans beginning at age 55, a significant expansion of the large government health care program that currently serves the over-65 population.

Jon at Firedoglake is not impressed with the likely details of the Medicare proposal. It won't cover that many people and is not really a buy-in. By the time they are done, it may not even really be Medicare.

Update: WaPo: The public option is being shelved in favor of other alternatives.

Here's some details on the upcoming deal to lower the age of Medicare and drop the public option.

Under the potential trade-off with party moderates, near-retirees beginning at age 55 or 60 who lack affordable insurance would be permitted to purchase coverage under Medicare, which generally provides medical care beginning at 65. Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor, would be open to all comers under 300 percent of poverty, or slightly over $66,000 for a family of four.

So, it's only for those over 55 without affordable insurance. What does that mean? How many people is that? Why can't all people over 55 get it?

Sen. Mark Udall and ten other freshman senators who have drafted an "amendment package" will be holding a press conference tomorrow. Udall will be one of those speaking on the Senate floor.

The Republican effort to reject the Medicare cuts in the bill failed today. [More...]

As BTD has been writing this morning, the new CBO report (pdf) is out crunching numbers on the proposed health care legislation. For those interested in the effect of the excise tax on high-end, small-group insurance plans, here's my take on what it says (shorter verison: ditch your plan for one providing fewer benefits if you want to avoid higher premiums):

First, what the excise tax is:

Beginning in 2013, insurance policies with relatively high premiums would be subject to a 40 percent excise tax on the amount by which the premiums exceeded a specified threshold. That threshold would be set initially at $8,500 for single policies and $23,000 for family policies (with certain exceptions); after 2013, those amounts would be indexed to overall inflation plus 1 percentage point.

Next: the effects of the excise tax on high-premium insurance policies offered through employers: [More...]

The Senate will begin debating the health care bill Monday.

The New York Times today has a long editorial on why it should pass, and opines the limited public option should not be an impediment:

Even a weak public plan would be better than no public plan. It would expand the choices available to millions of Americans and could help slow the relentless increases in the cost of health insurance.

It also lays out what the public option would and would not do in both the House and Senate versions.

Are Democrats really willing to forego the public option? Sounds like it.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chamber's second-ranking Democrat, acknowledged he was open to changing the bill's controversial government-run public health insurance option favored by the left."We are open because we want to pass the bill," Durbin told the NBC program "Meet the Press."

Now what? Nate Silver says progressives should give it up, it's not that big a deal anyway and reconciliation could lead to other good provisions being stripped. Jon at Firedoglake disagrees. And FDL's Jane Hamsher explains the progressive reasoning behind choosing the public option as a fighting point. [More...]