As everyone is surely aware the Senate’s two cloture votes failed. This means that the bill is still available to be amended. Sen. Reid, who is the majority leader, has temporarily pulled the bill, which means that no formal action can take place.
HLG is reasonably confident that the bill is still being worked on behind the scenes. A lot of Senators have burned a lot of political capital in order to get this far. HLG thinks that this summer we’ll see a lot of these “CIR is dead” headlines, soon followed by “CIR back on?” headlines.
For Schedule A nurses and PTs, this means we can re-focus on the bridge legislation. As we noted yesterday the bridge was offered as an amendment to CIR. That was strategic of course. The terms of the bridge are pretty clear, as one can tell from reading the amendment that was offered by Sens. Schumer, Hutchison and Durbin.
Going forward we’re still very committed to the bridge and will recommence pushing it asap.