Print
E-mail
Trick Or Treat: Reid’s Halloween Health-Care Horror?
By Colin A. Hanna, For The Bulletin
Halloween is just around the corner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. is getting ready for it. He reportedly has a few tricks up his sleeve to put the President’s increasingly unpopular health-care reform plan into a disguise that will keep its scariest parts out of sight.
Instead of allowing the bright sunshine of transparency to shine on the bill, as the public clearly wants, recent reports suggest that the majority leader prefers the shadowy world of backroom deals, and that’s where he is hatching his evil plan.
The senator, like a vampire hiding from the sun, opposes posting the text of the final health care reform bill on the Internet for 72 hours before it is put up for a vote, despite three polls conducted in the last three weeks that found widespread support for doing so. The polls conducted by Zogby, Public Opinion Strategies and Rasmussen showed support for 72 hour Internet posting at 91, 91 and 83 percent, respectively.
A senior but unnamed Mr. Reid aide told Cybercast News Service reporter Nicholas Ballasy that the Senate majority leader is considering using an already-passed House bill as a skeleton on which he will hang the final version of the Senate’s healthcare reform bill that the senator is responsible for creating, rather than bringing it to the Senate floor in the customary manner. Like a mad scientist, Mr. Reid reportedly plans to use HR 1586, a bill that passed the House last March, to impose a tax on bonuses received by executives from companies that took TARP money as his laboratory monster. By the parliamentary trick of substitution, it will be transformed into the final Senate version of health care reform without any further committee debate.
Under this scheme, Mr. Reid, who is responsible for merging the health care plans being considered by the Senate Finance and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees, would gut the House bill and replace it with a new Senate health care reform bill that has never before been disclosed, and, thus, has never been subject to debate.
“If we received another revenue raising bill from the House, we could use that as well,” the aide said. “The underlying text of the bill only matters in the fact that it is a revenue raising bill so that it can serve as a vehicle for us to use. That is all. Once you substitute another bill into it that is what the legislation becomes.”
According to the Heritage Foundation’s blog, The Foundry, this is one of several ghoulish steps the Democrats have conjured up to use parliamentary tactics to bypass popular participation in the process.
The first step involves getting final Senate Finance Committee approval of Chairman Max Baucus’, D-Mont., on health care reform. That has been accomplished.
The second step in this cold-blooded plan is to use it as the basic framework for the final bill that will be cobbled together in the dark of night behind closed doors. This setting makes it easy for House leadership and Obama administration officials to influence the bill along with the Senate so that it receives unconditional support from both Houses of Congress and the White House.
The third step is to bring back from the dead the public option that was soundly rejected by the Finance Committee. This is comparatively simple since it is part of the Health Education Labor and Pensions bill that Reid will merge into the Baucus bill.
The fourth step requires a filibuster-proof majority that makes possible the execution of this plan over the certain but futile objections of Republicans. Massachusetts’ law barring Gov. Deval Patrick from appointing Ted Kennedy’s replacement was repealed, and Sen. Paul Kirk was sworn in on Sept. 25, thus bringing Senate Democrats back to the critical 60-vote threshold.
On the other side of the Capitol, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said that he wouldn’t rule out voting on the Senate bill as an amendment to the House bill without further change. This would be the fifth and final step in this spooky scheme and would avoid a messy drawn-out conference committee process. Although unlikely, it could even move swiftly enough to get President Obama his healthcare Frankenstein in time for Halloween.
As offensive as this abuse of process may be to Republicans, it also carries enormous political risk for Democrats because it flies in the face of public demands for more openness. Should Mr. Reid, Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Hoyer take this route, they may discover that they have created skeletons in closets that will come out to haunt them at the 2010 mid-term elections. It’s seldom smart politics to get on the wrong side of an issue that polls as high as 91 percent.
Colin A. Hanna is president of Let Freedom Ring, a nonprofit, grassroots organization supporting a conservative agenda.
Instead of allowing the bright sunshine of transparency to shine on the bill, as the public clearly wants, recent reports suggest that the majority leader prefers the shadowy world of backroom deals, and that’s where he is hatching his evil plan.
The senator, like a vampire hiding from the sun, opposes posting the text of the final health care reform bill on the Internet for 72 hours before it is put up for a vote, despite three polls conducted in the last three weeks that found widespread support for doing so. The polls conducted by Zogby, Public Opinion Strategies and Rasmussen showed support for 72 hour Internet posting at 91, 91 and 83 percent, respectively.
A senior but unnamed Mr. Reid aide told Cybercast News Service reporter Nicholas Ballasy that the Senate majority leader is considering using an already-passed House bill as a skeleton on which he will hang the final version of the Senate’s healthcare reform bill that the senator is responsible for creating, rather than bringing it to the Senate floor in the customary manner. Like a mad scientist, Mr. Reid reportedly plans to use HR 1586, a bill that passed the House last March, to impose a tax on bonuses received by executives from companies that took TARP money as his laboratory monster. By the parliamentary trick of substitution, it will be transformed into the final Senate version of health care reform without any further committee debate.
Under this scheme, Mr. Reid, who is responsible for merging the health care plans being considered by the Senate Finance and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees, would gut the House bill and replace it with a new Senate health care reform bill that has never before been disclosed, and, thus, has never been subject to debate.
“If we received another revenue raising bill from the House, we could use that as well,” the aide said. “The underlying text of the bill only matters in the fact that it is a revenue raising bill so that it can serve as a vehicle for us to use. That is all. Once you substitute another bill into it that is what the legislation becomes.”
According to the Heritage Foundation’s blog, The Foundry, this is one of several ghoulish steps the Democrats have conjured up to use parliamentary tactics to bypass popular participation in the process.
The first step involves getting final Senate Finance Committee approval of Chairman Max Baucus’, D-Mont., on health care reform. That has been accomplished.
The second step in this cold-blooded plan is to use it as the basic framework for the final bill that will be cobbled together in the dark of night behind closed doors. This setting makes it easy for House leadership and Obama administration officials to influence the bill along with the Senate so that it receives unconditional support from both Houses of Congress and the White House.
The third step is to bring back from the dead the public option that was soundly rejected by the Finance Committee. This is comparatively simple since it is part of the Health Education Labor and Pensions bill that Reid will merge into the Baucus bill.
The fourth step requires a filibuster-proof majority that makes possible the execution of this plan over the certain but futile objections of Republicans. Massachusetts’ law barring Gov. Deval Patrick from appointing Ted Kennedy’s replacement was repealed, and Sen. Paul Kirk was sworn in on Sept. 25, thus bringing Senate Democrats back to the critical 60-vote threshold.
On the other side of the Capitol, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said that he wouldn’t rule out voting on the Senate bill as an amendment to the House bill without further change. This would be the fifth and final step in this spooky scheme and would avoid a messy drawn-out conference committee process. Although unlikely, it could even move swiftly enough to get President Obama his healthcare Frankenstein in time for Halloween.
As offensive as this abuse of process may be to Republicans, it also carries enormous political risk for Democrats because it flies in the face of public demands for more openness. Should Mr. Reid, Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Hoyer take this route, they may discover that they have created skeletons in closets that will come out to haunt them at the 2010 mid-term elections. It’s seldom smart politics to get on the wrong side of an issue that polls as high as 91 percent.
Colin A. Hanna is president of Let Freedom Ring, a nonprofit, grassroots organization supporting a conservative agenda.
 |
 |
|
| CAIR’s Inner Workings Exposed | Why Obama Won The Nobel Prize |
Reader Comments
The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of thebulletin.us.
You must register with a valid email to post comments. Only your Member ID will be posted with the comments.
Registered users sign in here: |
Become a Registered User |
