NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON
Fresh off a marathon weekend session on health care and headed into an up-or-down cloture vote this week, senators weighed in Sunday on the pace of the legislation and debate on "CBS's "Face the Nation."
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Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who secured an extra $300 million in federal funding for her state's Medicaid program, blamed Republicans for a likely Christmas eve vote, saying their only tactic is to delay.
"We've been discussing this issue for 40 years... since last March, this discussion has been public," Landrieu said. "It's been widely distributed, the language has been on the Internet."
"Ninety four percent of all Americans are now going to have health care," she went on. "It is not being done in a very quick way, we have been debating this all year...We wish the Republicans would have joined us, but it is easy to be unified when the only word in your vocabulary is 'no.'"
Sen Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said that there were still questions about what's in the bill but seemed to hold out hope that something could change. "It's never done in the Senate until it's done," he said.
"It is outrageous to give us a 2,700 page bill in the middle of a snow storm.," Alexander said." We got a 400-page amendment yesterday...we shouldn't be voting in the middle of the night."
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) simply said that "everyone knows what's in this bill," and with Republicans..."it's just a question of delay."
