Please Mr. Bear, Don’t Throw me into the Reconciliation Patch
Posted by Dan Perrin
YouTube- Monty Python-The Black Knight
The public is King Arthur — the Black Knight is the Speaker and the Trillion Dollar President.
The Speaker and the White House just cannot stop themselves — more health care!
The Mouth of the Potomac is reporting that The Speaker will announce to her caucus that they will go the Reconciliation route.
Oh, the irony of yet another House Member pretending to either understand the Senate rules or understand the implications of choosing to go with the Reconciliation strategy.
The land mines they are going to have to defuse, politically, are the same ones they have left sitting unexploded in the either the Senate passed bill and the House passed bill, and the same ones they could never get to an agreement on.
They will still be in the health bill and the reason they did not deal with them is because they force really big bad political reactions. And now the Dems get to do it all again. OH boy!
But they will have to attempt to deal with all the political cross pressures of comprehensive reform while operating under severe legislative restrictions on the process and a completely new scoring. They are going to find that they are increasing the degree of political, legislative and budgetary difficulty in many respects.
To take these sorts of huge political risks with a process they do not understand is, well, irrational. And Democratic House members have no clue what the Reconciliation rules in the Senate are — and they still have not learned the rules from the 1994 elections or the failure of HillaryCare.
But they will be taught another lesson in 2010. They seem to need the teaching, especially the Trillion Dollar President and the Speaker. Lesson one was NJ and VA. Lesson two was what happened to Senators Nelson and Landrieu. Lesson three is what happened to Obama’s approval ratings. Lesson four is the generic ballot numbers and lesson five is Massachusetts.
Lesson six will be the collapse of their health reform bill under reconciliation.
It will take many, many months, and all while they are ignoring jobs and the economy and the debt and the deficit, they can work on the one issue that has hammered them politically for 12 months — health care. (By the way, the media cannot stop covering health care either — for once the media are poisoning the Dem well.)
The Speaker and the White House are politically desperate and have acted irrationally throughout this entire process. Desperate and delusional people make really bad decisions. Taking the Reconciliation route is yet another bad call. If they cannot pass the Senate bill in the House, or the House bill in the Senate, or a modified Senate bill in the House, or the Senate bill modified by the House in the Senate — then reconciliation is going to solve their problems?
Really? They do not even know what Reconciliation rules will do to their bill or the challenges they will face. Perhaps, since Sen. Byrd’s health is rumored to be really bad, they are thinking with Senator Byrd out of the way they go ahead and shred the Byrd rule of not legislating on a reconciliation bill.
If I was a Democratic Senator or Democratic Member I would be seriously worried. The public wants Congress to do nothing on health care but the leadership will not stop, nor can anyone or any political event stop them.
So the Dems want to go back to the Committee level — NICE.
The Speaker and the White House have really lost it. The plan, as I understand it, is they are going to go farther left with their reconciliation bill? Put back the public option? OK. Time to weapon-up.
So resupply the spent ammo, refit the worn-out triggers because it is back to battle we go, with a broken, confused, dazed and uncertain opponent who has been wounded but insists they are not — think the black knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
Posted by Dan Perrin
YouTube- Monty Python-The Black Knight
The public is King Arthur — the Black Knight is the Speaker and the Trillion Dollar President.
The Speaker and the White House just cannot stop themselves — more health care!
The Mouth of the Potomac is reporting that The Speaker will announce to her caucus that they will go the Reconciliation route.
Oh, the irony of yet another House Member pretending to either understand the Senate rules or understand the implications of choosing to go with the Reconciliation strategy.
The land mines they are going to have to defuse, politically, are the same ones they have left sitting unexploded in the either the Senate passed bill and the House passed bill, and the same ones they could never get to an agreement on.
They will still be in the health bill and the reason they did not deal with them is because they force really big bad political reactions. And now the Dems get to do it all again. OH boy!
But they will have to attempt to deal with all the political cross pressures of comprehensive reform while operating under severe legislative restrictions on the process and a completely new scoring. They are going to find that they are increasing the degree of political, legislative and budgetary difficulty in many respects.
To take these sorts of huge political risks with a process they do not understand is, well, irrational. And Democratic House members have no clue what the Reconciliation rules in the Senate are — and they still have not learned the rules from the 1994 elections or the failure of HillaryCare.
But they will be taught another lesson in 2010. They seem to need the teaching, especially the Trillion Dollar President and the Speaker. Lesson one was NJ and VA. Lesson two was what happened to Senators Nelson and Landrieu. Lesson three is what happened to Obama’s approval ratings. Lesson four is the generic ballot numbers and lesson five is Massachusetts.
Lesson six will be the collapse of their health reform bill under reconciliation.
It will take many, many months, and all while they are ignoring jobs and the economy and the debt and the deficit, they can work on the one issue that has hammered them politically for 12 months — health care. (By the way, the media cannot stop covering health care either — for once the media are poisoning the Dem well.)
The Speaker and the White House are politically desperate and have acted irrationally throughout this entire process. Desperate and delusional people make really bad decisions. Taking the Reconciliation route is yet another bad call. If they cannot pass the Senate bill in the House, or the House bill in the Senate, or a modified Senate bill in the House, or the Senate bill modified by the House in the Senate — then reconciliation is going to solve their problems?
Really? They do not even know what Reconciliation rules will do to their bill or the challenges they will face. Perhaps, since Sen. Byrd’s health is rumored to be really bad, they are thinking with Senator Byrd out of the way they go ahead and shred the Byrd rule of not legislating on a reconciliation bill.
If I was a Democratic Senator or Democratic Member I would be seriously worried. The public wants Congress to do nothing on health care but the leadership will not stop, nor can anyone or any political event stop them.
So the Dems want to go back to the Committee level — NICE.
The Speaker and the White House have really lost it. The plan, as I understand it, is they are going to go farther left with their reconciliation bill? Put back the public option? OK. Time to weapon-up.
So resupply the spent ammo, refit the worn-out triggers because it is back to battle we go, with a broken, confused, dazed and uncertain opponent who has been wounded but insists they are not — think the black knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.