Harry Reid’s Massive Health Care Bill Emerges from the Back Room
Democrats sure do like to hold big health care votes on Saturdays when most people are paying more attention to their families and devoting more time to recreation and relaxation than to politics. According to the Washington Examiner, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin says a vote to move forward with Majority Leader Harry Reid’s just released 2,074-page health care bill “will be held on Saturday.“
He needs sixty votes in the Senate to open debate on a bill. And a number of Democrats appear to be balking.
Reid’s bill was crafted behind closed doors, in those proverbial smoke-filled rooms of political lore, though with today’s Democrats, such rooms probably have more juice cocktails than smoke. Nancy Pelosi’s behemoth bill had similar origins.
In signaling his pleasure with the bill and urging the Senate to move forward, the President is breaking a promise he made on the campaign trail:
When I’m elected president you’re going to see this health care legislation written in the open. It’s going to be on C-SPAN, and you’ll be able to see all the different people arguing to see whether they’re on your side or they’re on the side of the drug companies and the insurance companies and so on. But you’ll be able to see that process on C-SPAN.
We didn’t even know what was going to be in the bill until Reid “presented the bill to his caucus at a 5pm meeting” yesterday. So much for transparency.
Just another example of how the “new kind of politics” that Obama promised is just the same old politics of years past, but with a bigger price tag.
4 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
The CBO had “scored” the bill that was released last night. It was reported that CBO had it for two weeks to do the scoring.
The bill will collect taxes starting immediately, but the nationalized health care goes into effect after the inauguration in 2013. The CBO counted the income against the expenditures from the passage of the bill. Ergo, the deficit neutral act gets three years of head start on raising revenue to balance against seven years of spending.
Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure. The sham artists have larded this piece of pork trash with accounting gimmickry and the CBO has played the game with them.
There are lies, damned lies and Obama and the Democrat Congress. I would rather have a gun pointed at my head than to be waterboarded by liberals thinking they are fooling me with their doublespeak and righteous claptrap.
Comment by heliotrope — November 19, 2009 @ 9:14 am - November 19, 2009
Hey – What has happened with the Democrats’ campaign promise to put the full text of bills on the Internet – for 5 days I think – before they’re voted on? Have they kept it?
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — November 19, 2009 @ 10:03 am - November 19, 2009
Is it too early to get the fork out?
Comment by Sonicfrog — November 19, 2009 @ 11:50 am - November 19, 2009
“Democrats sure do like to hold big health care votes on Saturdays ”
What possible difference does that make? Do you imagine that if the vote were held on a weekday, then everyone would tune into C-SPAN to listen to the classical music and watch the milling around that happens during a vote?
Comment by Tano — November 19, 2009 @ 2:28 pm - November 19, 2009