The votes on Tuesday set the stage for a compromise under which the public plan could be offered in states where people could not find affordable private coverage, Mr. Carper said.
The change was a significant complication for the new House leadership, which had hoped that their original proposal would mollify their membership while setting the stage for a compromise with the Senate and President Obama.
To avoid the question, he urged settlers in New Mexico and California to bypass the territorial stage and draft constitutions for statehood, setting the stage for the Compromise of 1850.
It was therefore inevitable that someone would try and open up a middle way on Europe, though perhaps less so that the pioneer should be David Owen, whose career, for a middle-way politician, revealed at every decisive stage an incapacity for compromise which eventually was destroyed by it.
That leaves little space for compromise.
After days of frantic political wrangling, Mr. Papandreou survived a confidence vote in Parliament on Friday, setting the stage for Sunday's compromise.
With so many red lines drawn in the opening stages of negotiations, room for compromise is already shrinking.
It would be a marvellous thing, even at this late stage, if one could call for compromise and old-fashioned common sense, for the government to intervene to knock heads together.
While The New York Times reported last month that Washington and Tehran were testing the waters for direct talks — an idea denied in both capitals — Iranian hard-liners turned the annual commemoration on Friday into a stage for opposing any form of compromise.
Mr. Berman's counterpart at Common Cause, Scott Harshbarger, said the board's compromise set the stage "for holding open and democratic elections on an international basis in the new online world of the future".
