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WSJ: Change Nobody Believes In
And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.
Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world’s greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new “manager’s amendment” that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what’s in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.
Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.
The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that “reform” has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.
AFF Releases Ads in Targeted States
ObamaCare Keeps Falling in the Polls
A business ad campaign could turn the tide even in the House.
by John Fund
The Senate’s compromise bill on health care was announced on Wednesday to much fanfare. But there’s not much there for moderate Democrats to write home about. It waters down a provision creating a “public option,” but it also expands (to include people over 55) Medicare, a program already expected to go bankrupt in 2017.
The Senate bill is so unwieldy that the health-care system it will create will almost certainly break apart and force us into Canadian-style care. As Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) said in a statement, the Medicare expansion “would perhaps get us on the path to a single payer model.” That grim prospect means there’s still a chance to defeat or reshape the health-reform effort.
Opponents of ObamaCare will be aided by polls showing that it is even less popular than HillaryCare was a year into the Clinton presidency. Back in December 1993, Gallup found that 47% of voters backed HillaryCare, with 32% opposed. Today, an average of health-care surveys at Pollster.com shows support for ObamaCare at 38.8%, with 51.4% against.
The difference is that in 1993 and 1994, ads pointing out the weaknesses of HillaryCare were ubiquitous on TV. This time the White House has bullied the health-care industry into silence or sullen support.
But the falling poll numbers tell us anyone who tries to force a full health-care debate that pushes a vote past the holidays will not suffer politically. One reason the Democrats are frantic for a vote before Christmas is that they fear what will happen if senators have to go home and talk with constituents before voting.
Even if the Senate passes something before Christmas, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) says the bill will likely have to go to a conference committee. There differences between The Senate version and the bill that has already passed the House must be reconciled.
Mrs. Pelosi says “we’d do almost anything” to finish the bill this year. But it is unlikely the House will be able to vote on a final bill until January. That delay gives opponents time to raise money for a campaign aimed at House members who were dragooned into voting for the Pelosi bill in November.
That legislation only passed 220 to 215. There will be new pressures on members for a second vote. Louisiana Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao, the lone Republican to vote for the bill, may not be able to support it again without strong limits on funding abortions—and several Democrats might feel compelled to join him.
Meanwhile, the new Quinnipiac poll reports that 63% of Americans believe covering the uninsured will increase their own costs, and that includes 44% of Democrats. Voters by 48% to 46% believe extending coverage to the uninsured would decrease the quality of their own care—including a majority of independents and 26% of Democrats. A full 74% of people don’t believe the president’s claim that health reform won’t add to the deficit, including 53% of Democrats.
There is also the issue of jobs. The unemployment rate is 10% and a new study by the National Federation of Independent Business estimates that mandating that employers provide health care will cost 1.6 million jobs by 2013.
These are all potent issues if TV ads and grass-roots activism can be directed into the districts of House Democrats vulnerable to defeat in 2010. Fourteen Blue Dog Democrats who voted to pass health-care reform last month represent districts rated as leaning Republican by the Cook Political Report. Another nine Democrats hail from districts that are only slightly Democratic. Pressure will be put on the 39 Democrats who voted no the first time to switch their vote, but they will be hard to budge. There are enough votes among the three groups to make it agonizingly difficult to pass health care a second time.
Speaker Pelosi has told her members that health-care reform is so important she is willing to lose 20 seats next year if that is what it takes to get it. Polls showing Republicans leading in the generic vote for Congress make some Democrats worry that she is seriously lowballing the risk. She may not mind if some members lose their seats, especially if they are moderates who are possible future votes against her in a leadership contest. The Blue Dogs who are the subject of her political science experiment may decide they’d rather not be her guinea pigs.
Reid: Dems reach ‘broad agreement’
Senate Democrats have reached a “broad agreement” on a health reform bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday night — a plan that would replace the public option in the current Senate bill with a new national insurance plan offered by private insurers, and a chance for older Americans to “buy in” to Medicare.
Democrats on Tuesday night took a major step forward on a plan by agreeing to ask congressional scorekeepers to give them cost estimates on a possible compromise that would break the impasse over health reform in the Senate.
In doing so, Senate negotiators moved decisively away from including a government-run health insurance plan that would start on Day One in any final compromise, a major disappointment for the Democratic base but one that is likely to prove necessary to win over fiscally moderate senators.
WSJ: Harry Reid’s History Lesson
By John Fund
Harry Reid compares the fight for health-care reform to the emancipation and women’s suffrage movements.
Majority Leader Harry Reid tarred opponents of his health care bill yesterday as the equivalent of those who opposed equal rights for women and civil rights for blacks.
In a remarkable statement on the Senate floor, Mr. Reid lambasted Republicans for wanting to “slow down” on health care. “You think you’ve heard these same excuses before? You’re right,” he said. “In this country there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, it’s too early. Let’s wait. Things aren’t bad enough’ — about slavery. When women wanted to vote, [they said] ‘Slow down, there will be a better day to do that — the day isn’t quite right. . . .’”
He wrapped up his remarks as follows: “When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today.”
Senator Reid’s comments were quickly condemned. “Hyperbole. It is over the top. It reminds me of earlier people talking about Nazis,” said Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News, author of “Eyes on the Prize,” a definitive history of the civil rights movement.
Historians also faulted Mr. Reid’s curious reference to the Senate civil rights debates of the 1960s. After all, it was Southern Democrats who mounted an 83-day filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. The final vote to cut off debate saw 29 Senators in opposition, 80% of them Democrats. Among those voting to block the civil rights bill was West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who personally filibustered the bill for 14 hours. The next year he also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mr. Byrd still sits in the Senate, and indeed preceded Mr. Reid as his party’s majority leader until he stepped down from that role in 1989.
The final reason Mr. Reid’s comments were so inapt and offensive is that the battles for women’s suffrage and civil rights he referred to were about expanding freedom. That’s not what the 2,074-page health care bill being debated in the Senate today does, with its 118 new regulatory boards and commissions. Mr. Reid may reach his needed 60 votes to pass his bill this month, but he is pursuing it using the most tawdry and deplorable of tactics.
NYT: Public Option for Senators
WASHINGTON — When it comes to slinging zingers across the political aisle, few lawmakers have sharper arrows than Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. So it might have seemed odd to see Democrats clamoring to support an amendment Mr. Coburn proposed to the health care bill to require members of Congress to be covered by a new government-run health insurance plan.
Mr. Coburn is a fierce opponent of the government plan, or public option. And his amendment was intended to take a shot at the Democrats by suggesting that they would offer the public plan to everyday Americans while retaining their own gold-plated coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program in a classic example of “do as I say, not as I do.”
But Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, who is as passionate a champion of the public plan as Mr. Coburn is an opponent, was more than happy to sign on as a co-sponsor of the amendment. Mr. Brown routinely voices his strong support for a fully government-run health system. Absent that, he views the public plan as the best way to clamp down on private insurers.
THEY SAID IT…BILL COSTS $2.5 TRILLION
Dems Admit That The Bill Will Cost “$2.5 Trillion” “Depending On Where You Start”
SEN. MAX BAUCUS (D-MT): “Health Care Reform” Will Cost “$2.5 Trillion”
SEN. MAX BAUCUS (D-MT): “Just for a second — health care reform, whether you use a ten-year number or when you start in 2010 or start in 2014, wherever you start at, so it is still either $1 trillion or it’s $2.5 Trillion, depending on where you start…” (Sen. Baucus, Floor Remarks, 12/2/09)
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Cheney: Holder Wants “Show Trial” for KSM
Former Vice President Dick Cheney unloaded on President Barack Obama and his administration in a radio interview Monday morning, saying that Obama’s recent bow before the Japanese Emperor was “fundamentally harmful” to the United States and indicates that Obama “doesn’t fully understand or have the same perception of the US role in the world that most Americans have.” Obama’s behavior on foreign trips is “very upsetting,” Cheney added. Read the article here.
