Obama Comes to Ohio (Again), Nobody Shows Up [Matt A. Mayer]
President Barack Obama, joined by Ohio governor Ted Strickland, came to Ohio today to continue his permanent campaign on health-care legislation. His campaign events during the 2008 presidential race attracted crowds of thousands of Ohioans; this time, President Obama managed a crowd of about 200 people. With his negative approval numbers in Ohio (44 percent approve, 52 percent disapprove), it isn’t much of a surprise that few showed up to hear him once again talk about health care. On health care, Ohioans disapprove of the job President Obama is doing (34 percent approve, 58 percent disapprove). On the health-care proposal, 56 percent of Ohioans mostly disapprove of it, with 43 percent believing that the proposed changes go too far.
The fact of the matter is that Ohioans are almost solely focused on jobs, jobs, and more jobs. On the economy, President Obama is heavily into negative territory (37 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove) as Ohioans in large numbers disprove of his handling of the economy. Given the fact that Ohio had a net increase in jobs from 1990–2010 of just 79,100 private sector jobs in a state of 11.4 million people, these findings shouldn't be a surprise. For Ohioans, it really is time that President Obama stopped trying to ram health-care legislation through and started doing what he said he would do in the State of the Union speech — focus like a laser on jobs.
— Matt A. Mayer is president of the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions
Pelosi Willing to 'Trust' the Senate to Pass Reconciliation [Daniel Foster]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a group of bloggers and reporters today that "I have no intention of not passing this bill. . . . I have faith in my members that we will be passing this legislation."
In an effort to counter-program the clear mistrust between House liberals and the Senate, Pelosi said she had
"asked [the Senate] to show me what it is they can show me that I would be able to convince my members to go forward," and added that she was "willing to trust the Senate that they are able to pass the reconciliation package."
But Pelosi also acknowledged that she is working against the clock (while explicitly identifying the whole of the Republican party as a "special interest group.")
"Time is important for us here, because this city is the city of the perishable and every special interest group out there who doesn't want this to pass—including the entire Republican party—benefits from any delay," Pelosi told those in attendance. "Delay is our enemy."
Pelosi: Obamacare Passage Will 'Kick Open Door' to Much More [Daniel Foster]
Don't take our word for it. As part of a round table with bloggers and reporters noted below, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that passage of Obamacare would “take the country in a new direction.”
“Kick open that door, and there will be other legislation to follow,” she said.
Pelosi argued that passing reform would give Dems a tool for drawing a sharp ideological contrast with Republicans and conservatives over time.
“Give them credit for being true to their convictions,” Pelosi said. “They don’t believe in health care for all Americans with any public role in it. That’s by and large what the Republican Party believes.”
Pelosi said passing the bill would allow Dems to undertake a “debate” with Republicans over “what is the balanced role that government should have.”
“We have to take it to the American people, to say, this is the choice that you have,” she said. “This is the vision that they have for your health and well being, and this is the vision that we have.”
More here.
Sweetheart Deals Not So Bad After All, Axelrod Says [Daniel Foster]
As key Democrats are (once again) claiming an 'end game' for health-care reform, the White House is backing off yet another promise in order to secure the final few votes the bill needs for passage.
The Associated Press reports:
Clinching support, though, might require Obama to back away from his insistence that senators purge the legislation of a number of lawmakers' special deals.
Taking a new position, Axelrod said the White House only objects to state-specific arrangements, such as an increase in Medicaid funding for Nebraska, ridiculed as the "Cornhusker Kickback." That's being cut, but provisions that could affect more than one state are OK, Axelrod said.
That means deals sought by senators from Montana and Connecticut would be fine — even though Gibbs last week singled them out as items Obama wanted removed. There was resistance, however, from two committee chairman, Democratic Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Chris Dodd ofConnecticut, and the White House has apparently backed down.
Axelrod said the principles the White House wants to apply include "Are these applicable to all states? Even if they do not qualify now, would they qualify under certain sets of circumstances?"
At the same time, wavering House Democrats are being treated to one-on-one White House meetings with the president, who is reportedly asking members 'what are you looking for in the bill?'
Axelrod's Whopper [Ramesh Ponnuru]
The Louisiana Purchase is really the Just-Happened-to-be-Louisiana Purchase.
Do They Really Believe in Obamacare? [Michael G. Franc]
The Congressional Insiders Poll in National Journal this week asks a cross-section of lawmakers a question that sheds some light on why Democratic party leaders continue to push Obamacare forward in such a politically reckless manner.
The insight: They honestly think its enactment would yield political dividends.
The National Journal asks: “If Congress enacts something close to President Obama’s health care reform plan, how would that affect your party in the midterm elections?”
The pool of respondents consists of 69 members of Congress: House and Senate; Republican and Democrat. They cover each party’s ideological waterfront — from Henry Waxman to Jim Cooper among Democrats and from Michele Bachmann to Olympia Snowe among Republicans. All ten Democratic senators in the pool voted for the Senate health-reform bill, of course, and all but six of the 59 Democratic House members did so. The members’ identities, moreover, are not linked to their responses.
Remarkably, 85 percent of the 44 Democrats who responded said passage of Obamacare would either help their party “a lot” (55 percent) or “a little” (32 percent). Almost all the explanations for why it would help are defensive and purely political in nature. In fact, only one response seems to come from the heart of a true believer who thinks the reforms will actually work. Among the political justifications:
“It’s getting something done, stupid.”
“It would regain a lot of the energy in our own base. Otherwise, we will be in deep trouble.”
“Democrats have to deliver. We are too far into this.”
“Passage means a Rose Garden signing ceremony and some immediate benefits. Failure to pass means incompetence despite our large majorities.”
The true believer, on the other hand, insists passage will help Democrats for more substantive reasons:
“If it passes, people see it’s not the end of the world and learn more about its benefits. The more they know about it, the more supportive they are.”
Every single Republican surveyed, in contrast, insists enactment will help the GOP to one extent or another, with 76 percent saying it would help “a lot” and the remaining 24 percent believing it would help “a little.”
Can we take these Democratic responses seriously, or are they just what we should expect from a cowering rank-and-file not wanting to incur the wrath of the speaker, the majority leader, and Rahm? Remember that, because this is essentially a private ballot, the respondents had every reason to be honest in their replies.
My guess is that most Democrats on the Hill are living in a parallel universe right now. They hear daily from an unrelenting Democratic base its support for whatever Team Obama wants. The cherry-picked poll results that dominate their political briefings are designed to reassure them that it’s okay to follow their leaders. (See the curious way Obama’s own pollster did this on Saturday’s Washington Post op-ed page.) They watch MSNBC, scour the liberal blogs, and read the New York Times editorial page. Most of all, they have faith. Faith that their young and charismatic president won’t let them down.
Their Republican colleagues, meanwhile, can’t believe what they see unfolding before their eyes. To them, passing a bill will prove much more damaging to Democrats in November than if they simply walked away from the health-reform table and focused on more important issues like job creation. As one Republican respondent told National Journal, the effort to pass Obamacare is nothing less than “an act of political suicide.” Another mused that if Obama care is enacted “the protests last summer will pale in comparison with the turnout next November.” The result, a third Republican predicted: “the Republicans will win the House, possibly by a wide margin.”
Has legislation of such magnitude ever provoked such wildly disparate assessments from the two national parties — not just in terms of its substance but also in what its enactment would mean politically?
All this is more evidence that the end game on Obamacare is nothing less than the legislative equivalent of total war, the sort of total war that visits Washington only once every few generations.
Dreier: Democrats 'About 10 Votes Off' from Passage in House [Daniel Foster]
In a press conference on Capitol Hill today, Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee, said the word around the House is that Democrats are still about 10 votes away from securing the 216 they will need to pass changes to the health-care bill. Dreier added that that number might be moving in the wrong direction for Democrats.
“You are hearing that people are peeling off,” he said.
Dreier also repeated the warnings about the Senate that many Congressional Republicans have been issuing to the other side of the aisle. He said that, assuming House Democrats succeed in passing a reconciliation measure along to the Senate, even marginal changes made there would require the measure to return to the House yet again.
“I would not be terribly sanguine about the prospect of the Senate effectively dealing with this,” Dreier said, adding that only once in history has a reconciliation measure passed through the Senate without a single amendment.
The reconciliation measure would also have to be sent back to the House if any provisions contained therein were struck down by the Byrd Rule. A memo from Dreier's office put it this way:
The one thing that history demonstrates is that the reconciliation process in the Senate is unpredictable. No matter how well you “scrub” the provisions in a bill for potential Byrd rule violations, something always gets through. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 had 3 provisions which were stricken on Byrd rule points of order despite a thorough review. The notion that the reconciliation bill will be immediately cleared by the Senate for the President is difficult to fathom.
Dreier said that Republicans won't know until later this week whether the Democrats will pursue a form of what has come to be known as the “Slaughter Solution” to avoid a direct vote on the Senate bill. But in the memo, Dreier's office gives three “flavors” such a rule could take. It could simply self-enact the Senate bill and send it to the president to sign. It could deem the Senate bill passed upon passage of the reconciliation measure in the House. Or, in the most unprecedented option, it could deem the Senate bill passed in the House only when the Senate passes the House reconciliation measure.
UPDATE: As several readers noted, the first draft of this post was unclear on whether the whip count was moving toward or away from passage. To clarify, Dreier suggested that the Democrats could be losing votes.
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