The White House is signaling that it’s full speed ahead on getting a bill to the President’s desk, but after Tuesday night that will be much easier said than done. With Scott Brown promising to be the 41st vote against ObamaCare and the threat of a filibuster in the Senate fully restored, just how do they expect to do that? Here are the options I’ve seen tossed around:

1 ) Ram it through the Senate before Brown is seated- Not going to happen, even if House and Senate Dems agreed on a compromise bill and could get it together quickly for both chambers to sign off on. Democrats Jim Webb and Claire McCaskill, as well as Barney Frank, have already thrown cold water on that idea, too, and the optics of shoving something through before Brown can cast his vote would be so poor they wouldn’t dare try.

2 ) Force the House to accept the Senate bill without changes, so that can go straight to the President’s desk- Extremely unlikely. The Senate version has no public option and includes taxes on so-called ‘Cadillac’ health plans that unions vociferously oppose, bitter pills House liberals will find hard to swallow. Pelosi herself said the Senate bill needs changes. Also, the Senate bill is less restrictive on the abortion issue, which House Blue Dog Democrats are sure to find objectionable. The first “reform” package only passed the House by a handful of votes, and they’re already assured of losing one of them. If House liberals cave, fine…but there isn’t a lot of incentive for them to go along with the Senate.

3 ) Use reconciliation- In order to bypass the filibuster in the Senate, Democrats could employ a special budgetary process where parts of ObamaCare can be passed with only a simple majority. But, this procedure is limited to only items pertaining to budgetary issues, which leaves out such things as the insurance mandate, state-level insurance exchanges, and ending the pre-existing condition limitation on issuing insurance. So, there’s not a whole lot that could get through, plus the optics would once again be pretty bad (though Republicans used it under Bush).

4 ) Break up the bill and pass the smaller pieces- It’s been said that there’s bipartisan agreement on some 80% of ObamaCare, so this avenue makes a lot of sense. Democrats would get some of what they want and force Republicans to vote against individual bills which, by themselves, would probably command popular support (ex. ending the pre-exisiting condition limitation). If they decide something is better than nothing, I think this route is a strong possibility.

5 ) Go to conference, decide on a compromise bill, and force the Senate GOP to use the filibuster- By doing so Democrats can go into the midterms saying they tried, but Republicans killed it. Since the bill as is remains unpopular that’s very risky, b/c many will applaud the GOP while the Democrats-even with hefty majorities-will be seen as weak and unable to get anything done. I believe they’d rather have something to hang their hat on, so I doubt they try this.

6 ) Go to conference, decide on a compromise bill, and buy off a few Senate GOPers- Every Senate Republican voted against the reform package, but it’s not out of the question that Collins, Snowe, or Voinovich (who’s retiring) could possibly be swayed to support the final version.

7 ) Start over by pushing a much smaller bill that includes things Republicans want- Take some of the more popular things from ObamaCare, add portability and/or competition across state lines, and maybe you get enough Republicans to push something through. Progressives will howl as it will be, from their perspective, watered-down reform (if they even called it that at all), but its something that they can all say they came together to accomplish. Hard to say if either side is open to this now.

8 ) Drop it altogether- There’s no way they spend months focusing on health care reform and not do something. Sure, they could pivot to jobs and Wall Street reform while blaming the GOP for obstructing action on health care, but I think they’ve gone too far to throw in the towel. Democrats feel that Clinton lost Congress in 1994 because his own push for health care reform failed, so again I believe they want at least something for Obama to sign.

It’ll be interesting to see the approach they take. If anyone has their own thoughts about what they should do or what they expect to happen, feel free to share.