ObamaCare Update -- some kind of train wreck is coming

Reconciliation ? or Scrap Heap ?

Andy McCarthy: http://article.nationalreview.com/426738/awol-in-the-bunning-battle/andrew-c-mccarthy

Scott Brown vs. Reconciliation: 'I'm Challenging the President to Do Better'
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDE3N2E1ZWJmN2Q2ZmQ1OGExYzQ0ZWRlNjdkNWU0NTU=

Dems to Ryan: 'Get Ready, We're Reconciling' [Robert Costa]

“Get ready, we’re reconciling”— that’s what House Democrats are telling Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee. Ryan says Democrats are planning to “mark up a budget-reconciliation package as early as next Wednesday, which is probably a week before reconciliation will actually occur.” For now, he says, “they’re in the middle of trying to cut their deals,” all while “public outrage is building, not waning.”

In the Democratic caucus, “there are two pools,” Ryan says. “There are progressive ideologues in moderate districts who think they are going to lose anyway, so they might as well vote for what they believe in. Then there are the ‘no’ votes who are being twisted and turned with the carrot and the stick to vote for this thing.” Democrats, he says, are straining to make any deals “a little more opaque” to avoid bad press (see Kickback, Cornhusker).

Is repeal possible? “Think about it,” Ryan says. “This will be a new entitlement that says that just about everybody making less than $100,000 will have their out-of-pocket health-care costs capped by the government — no more than 2 percent to 9.8 percent of your income will go toward health care, and the taxpayers will pay for the rest. And it will take 60 votes to turn that off. It’ll take a big rift to turn that off. It’s ominous.” Nonetheless, Ryan says he has been “strategizing” with his legislative team to see how “we could do a reconciliation package to peel this thing back,” but admits that such a measure would be “very, very tough.”

Repeal or not, Ryan worries that the “collateral damage to the insurance markets and health-care sector will be devastating” if Obamacare passes later this month. “Insurance companies will have to immediately lay off workers to comply with the new regulations. . . . Even if we’re able to eventually turn this thing off, it will be a different-looking world.”


Ignore and Lie About This at Your Own Risk, Speaker Pelosi, President Obama . . . [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I mentioned this on the radio this morning. It's powerful stuff, from ABC this morning, via Mike Allen:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), author of anti-abortion language in the House health-care bill, tells ABC's George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning America" that he's willing to bring down the final bill if abortion language isn't changed: "[T]he bill that they are using as a vehicle is the Senate bill. If you go to page 2069 through page 2078, you would find in there the federal government would directly subsidize abortions, plus every enrollee in the Office of Personnel management plan, every enrollee has to pay a minimum of $1 per month toward reproductive rights which includes abortion. . . . [W]e’re not going to vote for this bill with that kind of language in there." . . .

STEPHANOPOULOS: "Let me be clear here. If the president doesn’t change the language, if your language is not accepted, you and your 11 colleagues who voted yes the last time will vote no this time. Does that mean you’re prepared to take responsibility for bringing down this whole bill?"

STUPAK: "Yes, we’re prepared to take responsibility. I mean, I’ve been catching it ever since last fall. Let’s face it, I want to see health care. But we’re not going to bypass some principles and beliefs that we feel strongly about."

Yes, Bart Stupak will vote for Obamacare if abortion is nixed. But considering the White House and co. is lying about abortion in the legislation at the moment, they don't seem to be positioning to give in to Stupak.

UPDATE: Here is video of Stupak appearing on Fox News, calling the legislative process on Obamacare "tainted" and predicting that the Senate bill "won't even come close" to passing in the House unchanged.


Bunning's Stand [Jonah Goldberg]

He explains himself in USA Today. An excerpt:

Last week, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked to pass a 30-day extensions bill for unemployment insurance and other federal programs. Earlier in February, those extensions were included in a broader bipartisan bill that was paid for but did not meet Sen. Reid's approval, and he nixed the deal. When I saw the Democrats in Congress were going to vote on the extensions bill without paying for it and not following their own Pay-Go rules, I said enough is enough.

Many people asked me, "Why now?" My answer is, "Why not now?" Why can't a non-controversial measure in the Senate that would help those in need be paid for? If the Senate cannot find $10 billion to pay for a measure we all support, we will never pay for anything.
America is under a mountain of debt. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a hearing last month that the United States' debt is unsustainable. We are on the verge of a tipping point where America's debt will bring down our economy, and more people will join the unemployment lines. That is why I used my right as a United States Senator and objected.


Re: Only the House Vote Matters [Daniel Foster]

Rich, Senator Gregg agrees with you:

The White House may renege on passing fixes to the Senate's healthcare bill once the House has passed it, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) claimed Thursday.Gregg, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, suggested that President Barack Obama may back off making changes to the Senate bill through the reconciliation process, which the White House and the Senate have said they would use to make changes to the Senate bill in order to placate House members.

"They're using reconciliation to pass the great big bill," Gregg said during an appearance on CNBC. "Once they pass the great big bill, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House didn't care if reconciliation passed. I mean, why would they?" . . .

"If you're in the House and you're saying, 'Well, I'm going to vote for this because I'm going to get a reconcilation bill,' I would think twice about that," Gregg said. "First because, procedurally, it's going to be hard to put a reconciliation bill through the Senate. Second because I'm not sure there's going to be a lot of energy to do it, from the president or his people.""In my opinion, reconciliation is an exercise for buying votes, which, once they have the votes they really don't need it," he said.


Something's Gotta Gibbs [Daniel Foster]

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs appeared on MSNBC's Daily Rundown this morning and said he expects Congress to act on Obamacare before the president leaves for Australia and Indonesia on March 18.

Gibbs also hit on all the Democratic end-game talking points: We incorporated a bunch of Republican ideas and they still won't budge; we already passed health-care with 60 votes in the Senate, but even if we didn't, reconciliation means nothing more than majority rule; and, most bizarrely, health-care reform means jobs. (Stay tuned for more on the first two points. I don't even know where to start on the third.)

There is also a great bit of circular logic thrown in when Savannah Stern asks Gibbs whether there are enough votes in the House to pass Obamacare today. Gibbs responds that if the vote were scheduled for today, it would be because they had enough votes. Gotcha


Krauthammer's Take On President Obama’s speech yesterday:

The process is exactly what we predicted a week ago.

The president and the leaders in the House and the Senate had decided they are going to go to reconciliation, which is, essentially, we are going to do it one-party, a party-line vote. That's what they are going for.

But they wanted to present it to the American citizenry as having tried to reach out. That's why you had the charade of the summit last week, seven hours of discussion when it was already pre-cooked that that wouldn't change anything.

That's why you had yesterday, the release of the changes that Obama was heralding as leaning over towards Republicans. For example, tort reform, which are absolutely insignificant and almost comical. With tort reform he is offering for a problem that we heard earlier in the program costs the American medical system $100 billion, $200 billion a year — he is offering a few pilot programs which are utterly meaningless and will amount to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obamacare.

But that's part of the deal. He wants to appear to be offering to incorporate Republican proposals. And now the pivot, which we had today. Obama says I tried, I reached out, Republicans are stubborn, oppositionists and nihilistic. I'm going to go for on a party-line vote.
For a man who campaigned as the man who would transcend partisanship, it's rather ironic that this is what he has decided to do.


Re: Only the House Vote Matters [Yuval Levin]

It's worth reiterating something Rich and Jeff Anderson have pointed out: The focus on reconciliation in the past few days confuses things a bit. The question in the health-care debate at the moment is whether Nancy Pelosi can get enough of her members to vote for the version of Obamacare that passed the Senate late last year. If the House passes that bill, it will have passed both houses, will go to the president, and will become law.

Some liberal House Democrats have problems with that bill — especially with some of its tax provisions, though also a few other things. So to get some of their votes, the leadership is now telling them that if they vote for the Senate bill, the House could then pass another bill that amends the Senate bill to fix some of what they don’t like about it. The Senate could then pass that amendment bill by reconciliation and it would also become law, and so the sum of the two laws would be closer to what they want.

But that amending bill wouldn’t change the basic character of what would be enacted (and to the extent it would change it at the edges, it would be mostly for the worse): Either way, if the House passes the Senate bill then Obamacare would become law, complete with its massive, overbearing, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended to replace the American health-insurance industry with an enormous federal entitlement while failing to address the problem of costs. Just about everything the public hates about the bill is in both versions. The prospect of reconciliation is just one of the means that the Democratic leadership is employing to persuade members of the House to ignore the public’s wishes and their own political future and enact Obamacare.

The fate of Obamacre therefore now rests not in the Senate but in the House. It is members of the House who must decide if it will be enacted, and it needs to be clear to voters exactly where their opposition to the Democrats’ approach to health care should be focused now.


One More No Vote [Yuval Levin]
Republican Congressman Nathan Deal of Georgia announced last week that he would resign from the House on March 8, to devote his time to running for governor. His departure would have meant that House Democrats only needed 216 votes, rather than 217, to pass their health-care bill.

But Deal has just announced that he has decided to stay in Congress until the end of the month, which would be after the Democrats’ self-imposed deadline for passing the bill (and would take them into the Easter recess, when members must again confront constituents, and which Speaker Pelosi therefore very much wants to avoid).

He was not coy about the reason for his decision:

“Yesterday, as I listened to President Obama’s aggressive push for a quick vote on ‘Obama-Care,’ it was clear that I must stay in Congress and continue to fight against the most liberal health care agenda ever proposed.”

That makes Pelosi’s job just a little bit harder.

Re: The Count [Daniel Foster]

More bad news for Pelosi. Greg Sargent reports that Rep. Frank Kratovil (D., Md.), who voted 'no' on the first bill and was hitherto thought of as undecided on the Senate bill, has confirmed he will now vote no.

Also, freshman Rep. Kurt Schrader (D., Ore.), another 'yes' on the first bill, is now undecided.