n the setup to the following interview with New York Democrat Congressman Anthony Weiner, Megyn Kelly reveals that the Fox News political team now calculates that Democrats are just “four votes shy” of being able to pass their unpopular Obamacare bill through the House.
The New York Times reports that Democrats have tentatively agreed to bundle the student loan bill (which would have the government directly lend to students and eliminate the role of private companies in federally-backed loans) into the health care reconciliation bill. Doing so could accomplish several things: 1) pass a student loan bill that can’t garner 60 votes in the Senate 2) allow Democrats to get around the requirement that the reconciliation bill would have to reduce deficits by $1 billion and 3) Potentially secure the needed votes to pass the Senate bill through the House.
The student loan bill comfortably passed the House with 253 votes, including those from 34 Democrats who voted against the health care bill. Thus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be thinking that if she can induce some of those Democrats into supporting a health care bill by attaching it to something they like, it may be able to make up for whatever defections she’ll have within her caucus due to abortion or other concerns.
[When something is so bad that you have to hide it from the people, maybe you should just walk away from it.]
VIDEO: Laura on Friday’s Good Morning America Posted by Staff
Donna Brazile argues Democrats will get the votes, “at the end of the day the speaker will go out there, she will talk to her caucus it’s a heavy lift but she will find the votes.”
See the whole debate here:
When friends fall into a spiral of self-destructive behavior, you have to try to break their delusions and set them on the right path. That’s what Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen are trying to do for President Obama and the Democratic Congress. The longtime pollsters warn in a Washington Post op-ed that if they don’t stop their “march of folly” on health care, Democrats face an “electoral rout in November”:
As pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively, we feel compelled to challenge the myths that seem to be prevailing in the political discourse and to once again urge a change in course before it is too late.
Here’s the “political reality” that Democrats aren’t facing, according to the pollsters.
1. The health care bill is unpopular. That may seem blindingly obvious, but shooting up heroin with a dirty needle seems like a pretty bad idea if you’re not a junkie. Inside the Beltway and within the liberal blogosphere, health reform junkies and their enablers dismiss negative polling and insist that voters really do like their plan. Snap out of it, says Caddell and Schoen.
Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.
However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit.
2. The era of big government is over, again. Voters are turning sharply away from big government and government decisions. Caddell and Schoen cite polls that show Americans distrust Washington more than insurance companies and fear the government is a threat to liberty. And the health care bill is very much a part of that meme.
Since the spectacle of Christmas dealmaking to ensure passage of the Senate bill, the issue, in voters’ minds, has become less about health care than about the government and a political majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people.
3. Stop digging. Many liberal pundits argue that Democrats will fare better at the polls if they pass ObamaCare, a condition known as Cohn’s disease, after The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn.
Nonsense, say Caddell and Schoen. Dems face a tough election if ObamaCare fails, but if it passes they “will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls.”
However, Obama and Democratic leaders show no sign of facing reality. Like an addict who still has his job and nice house, they may need to hit rock bottom before they’re ready to seek help.
LibertyPen—November 01, 2009 — Economics professors Walter E Williams and Thomas Sowell discuss what citizens can expect from government-run health care. http://www.libertypen.com
President Obama’s attempts to ram health- care reform through an increasingly reluctant Congress are starting to resemble a really eventful episode of “The Sopranos.”
Whether or not you believe former Rep. Eric Massa’s bizarre accusations of locker-room confrontations and conspiracies to drive him from office, there is no doubt that the Obama administration and its congressional allies are willing to use every trick in the book to get this bill passed.
They’ve already bought votes with pork and special deals — the “Louisiana purchase” ($300 million to bolster that state’s Medicaid program, which swayed Sen. Mary Landrieu); the “Cornhusker kickback” ($100 million to Medicaid there, sweetening the pot for Sen. Ben Nelson), and Florida’s “Gator Aid” (a Medicare deal potentially worth $5 billion, a hefty price for Sen. Bill Nelson’s vote). Plus the millions for Connecticut hospitals, Montana asbestos abatement and so on.
AP
Stupak: Dissenting Democrat being smeared by the left.
Nor were the Obamans willing to let a little thing like election laws stand in the way. They rewrote Massachusetts law to allow for an appointed senator to hold office for several months, hoping to get the bill through before the special election that Scott Brown ultimately won. Their plans spoiled, they even considered holding up Brown’s seating to let the appointed senator continue to vote on health care — until public outrage forced them to back down.
And, of course, there has been an unprecedented willingness to ignore congressional rules — from the failure to appoint a “conference committee” to negotiate differences between the House and Senate bills, to their current plans to use the reconciliation process to bypass a Republican filibuster.
Expect the tactics to get even dirtier now.
Those who support the president can expect favors. No sooner had Rep Jim Matheson (D-Utah) suggested that he might be willing to switch his vote and support the latest version of ObamaCare than his brother was nominated for a federal judgeship.
Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) is also on the undecided list. And, purely by coincidence no doubt, the Justice Department just announced that it is dropping an FBI investigation that has been swirling about the congressman. Gosh, if only Charlie Rangel were one of the undecideds.
Those who oppose the president can expect the political equivalent of a horse head between their sheets.
Some of this is just traditional electioneering: On-the-fence Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln is getting a primary challenger with some backing from the national Democratic machine.
But some of it is much nastier. Massa’s story may have credibility issues, but other opponents of the bill are also starting to feel the heat. For instance, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), whose opposition to abortion funding has become one of the bill’s biggest hurdles, is now seeing attacks on his ethics.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently questioned the legality of the low rent that a conservative Christian group charges Stupak for his DC apartment. She even noted ominously that disgraced South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford stayed at the same building. The liberal blog Daily Kos has picked up on the charges and suggested that both the IRS and the House Ethics Committee investigate.
“Politics ain’t beanbag,” as Mr. Dooley noted. Presidents have always twisted arms and made deals. And when two-thirds of voters are opposed to your plans, you may have no choice but to play hardball.
But when Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, we didn’t think he meant making it a “family” business.
Michael Tanner is a Cato In stitute senior fellow.
Democratic leaders have given up trying to satisfy Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and the dozen or so House Dems who want strict language barring abortion funding in the health care bill, AP reports.
A break on abortion would remove a major obstacle for Democratic leaders in the final throes of a yearlong effort to change health care in the United States. But it sets up a risky strategy of trying to round up enough Democrats to overcome, not appease, a small but possibly decisive group of Democratic lawmakers in the House.
***
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the leadership will press ahead without reworking the abortion provision, which opponents say falls short in restricting taxpayer dollars for abortion coverage. He predicted some of the anti-abortion lawmakers in the party will end up voting for the overhaul anyway.
Trying to find language that would satisfy the Stu-pack and make its way through Democrats’ convoluted reconciliation process may have proved too high a hurdle. Or maybe this is just a negotiating tactic.
However, without the dozen or so Stupak Democrats, it’s very, very hard to see how Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rounds up a majority. She’ll need to get roughly the same number of Democrats who voted no on the House bill in November to vote yes this time — without any other defections. But this is the one group of Democrats who can go to voters in the fall and say they never voted for ObamaCare. Many of them represent districts that John McCain carried in 2008. Several others hail from areas where President Obama’s approval ratings are likely under 50%.
IBD’s Sean Higgins e-mailed this possible reason for the move:
The Dem leadership doesn’t have the votes, knows it will fail and thus is setting up Stupak and Co. as the scapegoats.
At this point they have to throw somebody under the bus just to get this over with, so why not the few Dems that the feminists, abortion-rights lobby and the netroots already hate? Unlike the Blue Dogs, other more liberal Dems could probably win the Stupak crowd’s seats, right?
By: David Freddoso
Online Opinion Editor
03/11/10 4:25 PM EST
Bart Stupak, D-Mich, has been leading pro-life efforts to change ObamaCare, but Democratic leaders won’t play ball. (AP photo)
House Democrats have given up on fixing the Senate ObamaCare bill’s abortion problem, the Associated Press reports:
Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said Thursday that the leadership will try to secure the necessary 216 votes to pass the bill without reworking the divisive abortion provision.
The Senate version of health care reform would loosen current rules about federal money going to pay for abortions. The House version did not, and as a result a number of pro-life Democrats supported it. Because abortion cannot be fixed through an accompanying reconciliation bill, it looks like pro-life Democrats are out of luck with three bad options. They will either kill ObamaCare with their “no” votes, go back on their word and disappoint constituents by voting “yes,” or else watch it become law without their support.
President Obama recoils when his adversaries call his health-care plan a “government takeover” or suggest it will lead to bureaucratic rationing of care. He insists it would do nothing of the sort and dismisses such criticism as unfounded partisan rhetoric.
The president’s defensiveness is understandable: He knows that his plan is unpopular, in large part because the public deeply distrusts the federal government he wants to put in the driver’s seat. Among voters’ greatest concerns is that a health-care bill approved by Congress would lead to arbitrary government cost-controls that would make it more difficult for patients to get care when they need and when they want it.
Which is why the president’s latest health-care gambit is puzzling.
At the eleventh hour, President Obama has put yet another new idea on the table — the so-called federal Health Insurance Rate Authority — which will only deepen the fears of an anxious electorate, and rightfully so, because the express purpose of this authority is to give the federal government final say over the premiums private health insurers can charge their customers.
Perhaps the president simply could not resist the short-term political value that endorsing such an idea would open up for him. His “closing argument” for passage of his health-care plan certainly gives credence to this theory: His latest stump speech can be summarized as a demagogic harangue against the profits of private health insurers, which he now blames for practically every failing in American health care.
Or perhaps he felt he needed to shore up enthusiasm among House liberals. After all, he is asking them to support passage of the Senate bill, and many liberals find that measure insufficiently activist for their taste.
But whatever the motive, rolling out this idea at this time will almost certainly make the average voter even more suspicious of what Democrats are up to.
Once upon a time, the president seemed to believe that the rise in health-care costs was a function of many complex forces in the health sector. And that is why he hailed last year’s “deal” with doctors, hospitals, medical-device companies, drug companies, and insurers as a milestone in his “bend the cost-curve” drive.
Now, however, he is saying that the solution to costs is much simpler than that. All that’s needed is a federal authority to set insurance-premium rates, and painless cost control will soon follow.
But what happens if the premiums the government allows are insufficient to cover the medical costs of an insurer’s enrollees? After all, the federal government isn’t saying that insurers can diminish their coverage. To stay solvent, insurers will almost certainly argue that the government has to do something about the underlying costs of care. And, given the track record, the government’s predictable response will be to extend price controls even further into the health sector, perhaps by allowing all insurers to piggyback on Medicare’s regulated rates for doctors, hospitals, and others. But these kinds of price controls aren’t painless. They only work to hold down costs by driving out willing suppliers of services. Demand would be unchanged — if anything, demand will be stronger than it would have been without artificially deflated prices. The natural outcome is that, in time, there would be fewer hospitals, clinics, and physicians willing to take care of patients at the government’s arbitrarily low reimbursement rates.
The worst fears of the American public would then be confirmed. Government cost-control — even in the form of harmless-sounding “premium caps” — leads inexorably to waiting lists and inferior care.
The president and his allies are not principally on a mission to improve Americans’ health care — they are on an ideological mission to expand the power of government over Americans’ lives. This latest presidential power grab confirms that fact.
The Senate parliamentarian has delivered a blow to Democratic efforts to pass health care legislation by ruling that President Obama would have to sign the Senate health care bill into law before the Senate could modify it through reconciliation, according to a report by Roll Call, citing Republican sources.
While this wouldn’t make it impossible for Democrats to pass a health care bill, if the report is accurate, it would make the route to passage more difficult, because House members would have to take a leap of faith in voting for a Senate bill that they don’t like, based only on the assurances from the Senate that they would act to fix the bill once it gets signed.
Club Med: Are Dems Using Medicare Payments To Silence Doctors? It’s an annual Capitol Hill tradition: Automatic Medicare physician rate cuts loom, lawmakers suspend them for another year. But with a 21% cut set for March 1, Democrats only delayed it for a month. And Senate Dems only plan to extend that through August. What’s going on? Some Republicans and doctors say Democrats are using the “doc fix” to keep the AMA supporting the health overhaul.
“Doctors have been held hostage to get them to play ball on the broader health care reform package,” said Sage Eastman, spokesman for Michigan’s Dave Camp, ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee. “As health care reform has been delayed, so has the doc fix.”
“It’s being used as a club to get the AMA to keep endorsing reform,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, which opposes the overhaul.
The AMA endorsed Democratic health plans last year, when there seemed to be a quid pro quo to back ObamaCare if Congress permanently repealed Medicare payment cuts that lawmakers annually suspend.
But that repeal is a budget buster, so Democrats dropped it from the overall health bill to make the numbers seem to work. Anti-deficit fervor makes a long-term stand-alone fix especially tricky in an election year.
“A 21% cut would be a terrible mistake,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D. “But this is largely a matter of being fiscally responsible. A permanent doc fix would require us to come up with a lot of money.”
Democrats may have decided that a stick works better than a carrot — and is a lot cheaper.
Right Side Politics Examiner
