The Victorious Opposition

You could say that I’ve been a bit disengaged from local politics, seeing as how I was told for the first time this morning that there’s a vote on this today:

Proposition C

Shall the Missouri Statutes be amended to:

• Deny the government authority to penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services?
• Modify laws regarding the liquidation of certain domestic insurance companies?

It is estimated this proposal will have no immediate costs or savings to state or local governmental entities.  However, because of the uncertain interaction of the proposal with implementation of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, future costs to state governmental entities are unknown.

After work, I’ll be heading straight to the polling place to cast a “yes” vote.  As we learned from the Virginia lawsuit against ObamaCare, these state laws are essential for states to establish “standing” to bring suits against the federal government in order to stop the enactment of the individual mandate.

Naturally, I’m torn about relying on the courts to undo bad legislation (and ObamaCare is the single worst piece of legislation ever).  The courts are a complete crapshoot when it comes to figuring out how they’ll rule on anything (remember how shocking Kelo was?) and overturning any part of ObamaCare would carry the stigma of “judicial activism” (even though I don’t really believe that to be the case).  My preference would still be for the elected branches to eventually undo it, even if it takes years to do.

However, I can’t resist the urge to support an effort by my state and others to put some fire back into the 10th Amendment.  If the individual mandate is struck down thanks to litigation brought by the states, it would be a delicious comeuppance to the Obama Administration, considering its use of the federal judiciary to block state legislation that it doesn’t like.

UPDATE:   My civic duty is done.  If you’re looking for ballot returns and results, they’re here.  Prop C is well on its way to a resounding victory and I hope it scares the crap out of Washington Democrats.  It’s unclear if this will be a referendum on Obama, but only an idiot would say that it’s going to be anything but a repudiation of ObamaCare.

Nancy, Nancy, Nancy:

Nancy Pelosi spoke to musicians and the artistically inclined in Washington DC, and instead of telling those in attendance they should get a job, she brought quite a different message:

Hey California folk - get to work on getting rid of her, k?

H/T: Cato@Liberty

That one of these cases happened in California, which has perhaps the strongest domestic partnership laws in the country, makes this even more chilling:

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.
...

What happened next is even more chilling: Without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold’s lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

Note the key part up at the top - they had all the appropriate legal documents in place. The article does not state whether they were listed in California’s Domestic Partnership Registry, but in the face of powers-of-attorney, that shouldn’t matter. This is absolutely unconscionable.

Last week Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum to HHS regarding hospital visitation:

This is funny. Even better because even the Congressional Research Service can’t figure out what the law says, although the implications are pretty funny, that that sad, pathetic, “WTF were you thinking” form of “funny”:

It is often said that the new health care law will affect almost every American in some way. And, perhaps fittingly if unintentionally, no one may be more affected than members of Congress themselves.

In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says the law may have significant unintended consequences for the “personal health insurance coverage” of senators, representatives and their staff members.

For example, it says, the law may “remove members of Congress and Congressional staff” from their current coverage, in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, before any alternatives are available.

The confusion raises the inevitable question: If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?

Zing. Here’s the crux of the issue:

The law apparently bars members of Congress from the federal employees health program, on the assumption that lawmakers should join many of their constituents in getting coverage through new state-based markets known as insurance exchanges.

But the research service found that this provision was written in an imprecise, confusing way, so it is not clear when it takes effect.

The new exchanges do not have to be in operation until 2014. But because of a possible “drafting error,” the report says, Congress did not specify an effective date for the section excluding lawmakers from the existing program.

Under well-established canons of statutory interpretation, the report said, “a law takes effect on the date of its enactment” unless Congress clearly specifies otherwise. And Congress did not specify any other effective date for this part of the health care law. The law was enacted when President Obama signed it three weeks ago.

In addition, the report says, Congress did not designate anyone to resolve these “ambiguities” or to help arrange health insurance for members of Congress in the future.

Of course, I’m certain that Congress will move quickly to fix this problem - and most likely take the opportunity to make things more onerous and/or more expensive for everyone.

Or they could just go to the doc-in-the-box down the street like the rest of the poor schlubs living in DC

H/T: The Volokh Conspiracy

The coverage mandate in the “health care reform” bill is, umm, “controversial”, to say the least. I believe that it will turn out to be unconstitutional, as an invalid application of the Commerce Clause and/or Necessary and Proper Clause; the 10th Amendment arguments are likely non-starters, as the nullification/interposition arguments simply don’t hold up under the Supremacy Clause (i.e. if Congress is validly exercising a Constitutional power to legislate, that law overrides any state law to the contrary). This will be in court sooner or later.

But Obama and others raised an interesting point in their discussions of the mandate, and the point is worthy of discussion, even as most if not all of us reject the mandate solution to it. The point is this - if you require insurance providers to cover individuals with pre-existing conditions, what is to keep people from buying “just in time” insurance - wait until they are sick/injured, then go get insurance? A market working that way would clearly break the actuarial models used for insurance. If you’re going to require coverage for pre-existing conditions, how do you keep the system working?

The individual mandate is a simplistic solution; it clearly addresses that point. But it’s also clearly the wrong solution.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, since my wife and I have pre-existing conditions, and were declined private insurance because of them. The issue, as I see it, isn’t so much with coverage of the pre-existing conditions, but rather that we could be denied any coverage simply because of those conditions. We couldn’t get insurance that would cover us if we got hit by a car or had a heart attack or got cancer, just because I have IBS and my wife has migraines. That’s seriously broken, and needs to get fixed as part of real health insurance reform.

I look at this from a couple of perspectives. The first piece is that the reason most people lose coverage these days is because they lose their jobs. I.e. insurance is tied to the employer, not to the individual. There are advantages to such a system - pooling of risk, for example. But the downsides to this system are way too large. The system needs to be made individual-centric, not employer-centric. This is a system advocated by Cato (in one of the chapters (PDF file) of their “Handbook for Policy Makers”) and is also mentioned in Rep. Ryan’s Roadmap For America’s Future. If the insurance is tied to the individual (or family or whatever), then there is much improved portability, and the need to change coverage because you change/lose your job is eliminated. Hence the pre-existing conditions problem is significantly reduced, on the theory that you already have coverage for those conditions.

But that only goes so far. You’re still locked in to that provider/policy if you can’t get a new policy because of your pre-existing conditions. Hence there’s no real market out there. It seems to me that insurance providers should be still be required to offer you coverage, but allowed to exclude those conditions for some period of time and/or charge a higher premium for some period of time. That way you still can get coverage to deal with getting your leg broken by a runaway Toyota even though you have to pay for your own blood-pressure meds for 6/12/18 months, until you’ve paid in enough premiums, etc, to make the actuarial tables work right. Auto insurance works similarly in many jurisdictions - your premiums tend to go down after more time accident-free, with the same car, no points on your record, etc, etc.

Combine that with market-based changes like shopping across state lines as well as requiring providers to actually issue real quotes that allow for comparison shopping (as is the case for auto, home, liability, etc insurance), and I think you wind up with a drastically improved market-based system, as well fixing the pre-existing condition loopholes.

What do people think about this issue? Even though the mandate concept is fatally flawed, the underlying issue it was designed to address is still an issue. What’s the proper market-driven solution?

Update: I want to perhaps clarify the root point I’m trying to make here with a piece of a comment I made in a response below:

The root issue isn’t “I can’t get coverage for my pre-existing conditions”. It’s “I can’t get any coverage because I have pre-existing conditions”.

As I said above, it is completely reasonable to exclude coverage of pre-existing conditions for some period of time and/or charge a higher premium to cover them (e.g. a rider). But to exclude someone from coverage completely because they have some utterly-unrelated chronic condition? That’s not right. Especially with the other inequities in the market that get in the way of doing actual comparison shopping and allowing real market forces to decide some of this stuff.

A Phyrric victory for the Democrats and a defeat for, well, everyone else.

I’m not in Apocalyptic mode today.  Like many Americans, I watched these proceedings very closely and I’m disgusted by how this bill came about.  As far as I can tell, some Democrats passed this just for the sake of passing something while others were bribed with goodies to be revealed later.  It’s the foundation for what I am sure will become a huge new entitlement, it’s going to add to the deficit (the way distorted and overspun CBO report notwithstanding), and it’s going to destroy jobs at the worst possible time.  I think they voted for this bill for the wrong reasons and they did it in the wrong way.

Some conservatives are in “game over, man, game over” fits today but I’m not.  We were already pretty well screwed thanks to Social Security and Medicaid, those other entitlements that are going bankrupt.  This changes nothing and only shows me that Washington still doesn’t get it.  The voters chose to give the Democrats unchecked control of the government in 2008 and this is what we got.  In the next act, Obama and Congress will try to slip the public option back in, provide amnesty to the millions of illegal aliens living here, and so build the dependent voting bloc that will guarantee their dominance of government in the long term.  If they could pull this travesty off, the sky really is the limit between now and November.  The Administration will now be able to say: “You’re already screwed in November.  You may as well vote for amnesty/cap-and-trade/whatever and take any deal we offer.”

How stupid were the independents that believed that Obama was a post-partisan pragmatist or that electing Democratic Senators and Representatives in traditionally Republican areas in order to install far-left Democrat leadership in both houses of Congress would be a good idea?  If it’s true that they did it to punish the Republicans for Iraq, guess what?  Iraq is well on its way to becoming a prosperous, functional democracy while the Democrats here at home steamroll the opposition and dole out bribes with money the Treasury doesn’t have in order to dump a bill that a clear majority of Americans don’t want and think will harm the already crippled economy.  Great job, guys!  I don’t know if the GOP has exactly earned the right to be in the majority again, but it should now be beyond question that the Democrats are far worse when they’re in power.  Hate deficits?  Here’s more in one year than Bush could manage in eight!  Want health care reform?  Here’s something wildly unpopular that won’t reduce costs and it required Congressional arm-twisting and payola to drag across the finish line over bipartisan objections!  Hate the crappy economy?  Here’s new burdensome regulation and taxation to smother any hope of recovery!

What needs to happen is that certain elements of this bill need to die and the GOP needs to commit to strangling it in the crib.  There are lawsuits pending and I don’t know if that will work or not.  You know how I am about letting the courts be the final word on things.  I would rather not see this undone by a court, even though I wouldn’t cry about it if it did happen.  As I see, the elected branches have fucked up and it requires that the elected branches or the states unfuck it.  I want the Republicans to run on—and succeed at—reversing the worst parts of this bill before it completely goes into effect and, failing that, bring on a Constitutional Convention through the state legislatures to resolve it once and for all. 

This isn’t over, not by a long shot.

The Democrats are going to pass this scam legislation come hell or high water.

Obama actually made an attempt to kill the bargains used to buy the votes of recalcitrant Democrats in December (Nebraska and Louisiana, for example). But he backed off after the Senate insisted on keeping their bribes - to get the House to vote for the Senate bill?

In addition, the deals alienated conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats in the House. While Democrats no longer need 60 votes in the Senate (under reconciliation they only need a simple majority), they do need Blue Dog votes to pass the bill in the House. That is why President Obama pledged to eliminate the deals. But this past weekend the White House began backtracking. The reason? If the deals are cut to appease conservatives in her caucus, Pelosi may lose the votes of liberals. At least 45 House Democrats who voted for health-care legislation the first time around come from states that would reap rewards from the backroom deals. They would be in the awkward position of having to vote against provisions directly benefiting their constituents.

Now, if that’s not bad enough - the House so distrusts the Senate on the reconciliation process that they don’t want to pass the Senate bill and then do a separate reconciliation bill, because they fear the Senate will renege on any agreements made to “fix” the Senate bill. So they’ve created an entire new scam - they’re not going to vote on the Senate bill. Instead, they’ll vote on the reconciliation bill, and in the process “deem” that they passed the Senate bill:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic—known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass”—has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

The one thing you have to admire about Nancy Pelosi is that she doesn’t even try to cover up being a conniving scumbag:

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

That’s a refreshing bit of candor out of Congress, isn’t it? Good god…

Here’s the gist:

With her boyfriend in severe abdominal pain, Sharon Edge called 911 for an ambulance in the early morning hours of Feb. 6.
...
Nearly 30 hours later — and 10 calls from the couple to 911, four 911 calls to them and at least a dozen calls between 911 and paramedics — Curtis Mitchell died at his home.

Now here comes the meat of the issue:

In all, three ambulances were dispatched at separate times. In each case, Mitchell was told he’d have to walk to them — and he canceled the calls.

As the hours went by, Mitchell’s pain intensified and he began to have shortness of breath. Because he complained of abdominal pain, which is generally not considered life-threatening, he was initially ranked as a medium priority. About 11:20 a.m. Saturday, his priority level was upgraded, but not as an emergency.

Obviously, this death could have been avoided.  However, the exceptional circumstances involved with this case, in terms of weather, makes it difficult for me to indict the responders at face value.  I have a few questions that I hope our resident (former) EMT could address.  First, how does the priority system affect the response?  It sounds as if they were willing to provide the ambulance (amber lamps?), but not door to door service, due to the weather.  So, if there had been a higher priority, would that have changed their aggressiveness in getting this man out of the house?  For example, if this had been a heart attack, would the responders still have demanded that the patient walk to the vehicle? 

This sounds like an example of extremely unfortunate timing but I’m curious if there is any culpability—even with the weather, 30 hours seems like an awfully long amount of time to insist that an ailing person walk through snow—if the responders couldn’t easily make it through, what made them think that this ailing man could?

Dwex?

With a title like “Putting Americans In Control Of Their Health Care”, you’d think that maybe some libertarian concepts had actually crept into the White House health care plan.

You’d be wrong.

It’s pure window dressing. Top to bottom. Not a single substantive change from the Senate bill. True, there is no “public option” and there is no single-payer model (there are still exchanges, but they’ve taken the public option out of them). There’s still an individual mandate. The system is still fundamentally employer-centric, rather than individual-centric, making the portability thing a pure fiction. They say:

Nothing in the proposal forces anyone to change the insurance they have.  Period.

Leaving out the entire “as long as you remain with the same employer and the employer doesn’t change the plan”.

There is no attempt at actual Medicare/Medicaid reform. It pretends that elimination of fraud & waste is enough. Even assuming such were possible, that’s a ludicrous concept. They even spend more on Medicare by closing the Part D “donut hole”. Let’s not forget that Medicare Part D is unfunded in the first place.

They pay lip service to including GOP ideas (there’s a “Republican Ideas” page that lists the things they’ve pulled from GOP bills). None of these are remotely substantive. Pure window-dressing.

To make things worse, the Democrats are apparently planning to go the reconciliation route after all:

Democratic officials said the president’s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate. The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.

I have, of course, written to the President and my Congress-critters yet again to object to this move, as I’ve done every time it’s come up for the last year. A couple of Democrats have said they’ll oppose reconciliation. We shall see.

A month ago I asked why the GOP wasn’t taking the lead on health care. Seems to me that window has closed. The Democrats are now back on track. And the election of Scott Brown won’t amount to either diddly or squat at the end of this debate.

The most aggressive response to come from the GOP so far has been Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap For America’s Future”, which I discussed previously. Unfortunately, the GOP leadership has hung Ryan out to dry over this:

“Paul Ryan, who’s the ranking member on our budget committee, has done an awful lot of work in putting together his roadmap,” Boehner said. “But it’s his. And I know the Democrats are trying to say that it’s the Republican leadership. But they know that’s not the case.”

(emphasis in the original)

So Thursday’s “televised health care summit” will be exactly the dog-and-pony show that people are predicting. And the Democrats will ramrod some egregious form of health care “reform” through within the next month or so.

While the GOP continues to eat their young and think they can do better.

Politics as usual. Wonderful. Pelosi and Boehner need to be replaced. Maybe Ryan and Cantor can stage a coup; I’m not sure who I’d root for to stage a coup for Pelosi’s job, but pretty much anyone would be better.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I started having problems with my shoulder again last summer - pain, range-of-motion limitations and weakness. After a couple months of ibuprofin and getting back into my home PT program didn’t help, I went back to the orthopod. Went back on the high-dose anti-inflammatories, and did a month of physical therapy. Which got the pain under control and resolved the range of motion problems, but my shoulder is still crazy weak - I basically can’t lift more than 10 lbs or so if my arm is away from my body (i.e. no deficit if I lift something straight up at my side, but insanely weak if I have to lift or carry anything with my arm outstretched). We did another month of PT, with modest improvement of strength.

The big concern was that I had a rotator cuff tear. When I had my surgery in 2008, there was a tiny hole in one of the rotator cuff tendons, but they decided not to repair it, since repairing a tendon requires immobilization, and the problem we were in there to fix (the impingement) required that I get moving as quickly as possible after surgery. So there was concern that rather this hole had progressed into a significant tear, which would require another surgery and horrible long recovery. With school coming up, and the end of COBRA coverage expiring at about the same time, we decided we needed to figure this out quick, and if I absolutely had to have the surgery, to get it done ASAP.

So at the end of December I had an arthro-MRI done on my shoulder (a combination of an arthrogram with an MRI). This was a two-part procedure, done by two doctors in adjacent suites in one of the office buildings at the local hospital. For the first part, using a flouroscope, they injected a contrast dye into the shoulder joint (cool to watch, not a lot of fun to experience). Then over to the other suite for an hour-long series of MRI scans of the shoulder joint. The arthrogram is used for this because if there were a tear, the dye would flow into the gap between the tendon and the bone, and be highly visible.

Fortunately, there’s no issue that requires surgery. Unfortunately, my arm is still crazy weak. It’s improving - very, very, very slowly. So we’re sticking with anti-inflammatories, routine stretching, and weights three times a week to try to get it better. For the time being.

Anyhow, back on point. Let’s look at the billing, insurance payments and out-of-pocket payments for this. Since I’ve still got my old employer-sponsored insurance, via COBRA, it’s a good plan - an Aetna PPO with a modest deductible and co-insurance post-deductible.

In discussion about the State of the Union Address, Rich pointed us at the latest plan from the GOP, entitled A Roadmap for America’s Future. This is a just-updated version of a plan from 2008, which appears to be being driven by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin (aside - whenever I hear “Rep. Ryan”, this douchebag is who comes to mind - I need to break that habit, because they are completely different people).

The website is useful, and if you drill down enough, you can find this 100 page PDF document which really explains what’s going on. It’s not the best-structured document of all time - the actual proposals don’t show up until almost fifty pages into it, and while the stuff before that does a decent job of trying to explain what’s wrong, it’s both overly dense and overly terse at the same time (it goes into gory details on some issues, sometimes several times, and yet still depends on terminology and concepts that are probably unfamiliar to many of the people these detailed explanations are targeted at). This made it a much harder read than I expected. I hope that they restructure this document - perhaps summarizing the proposals first, then the details on the problems these proposals are designed to address, then the detailed versions of the proposals.

Anyhow, you should at least review the website, and skim through the document, if not read it fully.

Rep. Ryan introduced H.R.4529 on Wednesday, entitled “To provide for the reform of health care, the Social Security system, the tax code for individuals and business, job training, and the budget process.” (I love the grandiose titles that wind up on a lot of bills). The text of the bill still isn’t available yet; so it’s difficult to assess what they’re really proposing, so we’ll come back to that when the text is available. (Update: I found a link to the draft legislation drilling down through other stuff on their website. It’s 630 pages. I haven’t read it yet…)

There is a lot to like in this proposal as it currently stands, though I do have some major concerns. Let me get to my big concern first, though.

The GOP message on health care right now seems to be “We need to start over”. Period. It was said repeatedly, in almost exactly those words, on the Sunday AM shows (Orrin Hatch, John McCain, Mitch McConnell all said something of that ilk). Well, I agree with that sentiment. What I don’t get is - why isn’t there a concrete proposal for the common ground Hatch & McCain are saying is there? Why are they stuck on talking about the process, and not taking the lead on the substance?

It’s quite clear to pretty much everyone that the Democrats are currently in complete disarray on this topic - the House Democrats are at polar opposite ends of the spectrum from each other as their leadership tries to get them to pass the un-amended Senate bill. The Senate Democratic leadership is sitting on its heels with “wait and see” (which, actually, is an appropriate and somewhat commendable position for them to be taking). The White House is all over the place, backing absolutely everybody on every proposal, and hence having absolutely nothing useful to say on the topic.

I think people truly believe there is common ground. And there are GOP agenda items that are enormously popular (e.g. tort reform) that could be driven back into the conversation. Why aren’t we hearing this? In the GOP’s response to the President’s weekly message on Saturday, Rep. Boehner didn’t address it. As I mentioned, the Sunday morning talk show guests didn’t address substantive program ideas. TBH, I am unsurprised by this, but continue to be perturbed by it.

There is a short window here; it’s not impossible that the window closes Wed. night at the President’s State of the Union address, where he might re-take the initiative on this front. I was really hoping to see some leadership from the GOP. The GOP leadership continually claims to have ideas, plans, etc, but repeatedly fail to deliver any of that message, falling back into pure opposition politics. As I’ve said before - maybe that’s a viable tack to take on “stimulus” (although I continue to believe they just handed the Democrats victory with that tactic), but on health care, things absolutely need to be addressed on a range of topics that both parties agree on (e.g. pre-existing conditions, dropping coverage/coverage limits, access to insurance plans, drug costs, etc). There isn’t agreement on how to do these things, but there is agreement on issues (e.g. on the access issue, Democrats want the government to do it and Republicans want market changes to let the market do it, such as removing the interstate barriers, or on the drug cost issue, Democrats want regulation and Republicans want tort reform).

So I ask you - why is the GOP letting this golden opportunity to take control of the agenda slip away from them? Maybe they won’t succeed in getting their agenda through, but if they would take this fleeting moment to drive a concrete message to the public, they would completely flip the debate and show themselves as the party of ideas and the Democrats as the obstructionists. Right now they seem to be continuing to open the door for continuation of the “party of no” label, by failing to capitalize on the Democrat’s “party of better than nothing” moment.

Thoughts?

One-upping their previous most repugnant step of bypassing conference committee for the health care bill, the Democrats are now making plans for what happens when they lose their super-majority:

A top House Democrat said Tuesday that the Senate health care bill is “better than nothing,” an indication that the House of Representatives is considering passing the more conservative Senate measure with no alterations.

The House Democratic leadership may resort to that course of action if Massachusetts Republican state Sen. Scott Brown wins Tuesday’s race to fill the vacancy created by the death of Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Brown’s victory would deprive Democrats of their 60-seat Senate supermajority and give the GOP enough votes to block future Senate votes on health care and other White House priorities. If the House passes the Senate bill as currently written, however, the measure could proceed straight to President Obama to be signed into law.

Every day these people come up with a new way to make me sick to my stomach. I will, of course, be writing to my Congressman about this, and the President, and watching to see how many of the House Democrats decide to sell their souls to partisan politics (e.g. the Senate version of the bill doesn’t have the abortion-funding restrictions so many Democrats in the House got all moralizing about). I see a whole lot of Bill Nelson moments coming.

Right now I’m wrestling with whether “Party of No” is more or less evil than “Party of Better Than Nothing”. In this context, I’m afraid I’d have to fall on the side of “Party of No”, because while I adamantly believe health care reform is needed, this bill is much worse than nothing, and the process it’s taking is partisan evil incarnate.

My current Facebook status:

The Democrats truly suck. First they completely bypass conference committee to try to create a health care bill completely excluding the other team. Now that they might lose their super-majority, they are attempting to convince the House Democrats to pass the Senate bill unchanged (hence removing the need for new votes). Complete, utter bullshit.

No feedback on that yet. We’ll see how many open-minded liberals unfriend me over it this time…

From CNN today:

Top Democrats are prepared to short-circuit the traditional legislative process and exclude their Republican counterparts during final congressional health care deliberations, senior Democratic sources have told CNN.

Democrats are trying to prevent the Republicans from using Senate rules to slow the push for final passage of a comprehensive reform bill, the sources added.

...

Formal House-Senate negotiations, under the ordinary legislative process, would likely have started shortly after both houses of Congress reconvene. Democratic concerns over the GOP’s ability to slow the process, however, may result in the traditional process being replaced with informal, high-level talks, sources stated.

Via Congress.org, I sent the following note to the President, my Senators and my Representative, with the same title as this post:

In August, 2008, in a town hall meeting, candidate Obama said “I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table. ... what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

PolitiFact.com has already called this out for the broken promise that the “health care reform” process has been. But the administration and Democratic Congressional leadership continue to take this even farther. It is difficult to put into words how astonished I was to read today that the leadership is going to exclude the opposition party from the negotiation process by holding private negotiations, bypassing the normal conference committee process.

This is the most repugnant step yet in what has been a repugnant process. Both parties deserve to be held up for their ill behavior in this process. Besides the lack of openness promised by candidate Obama, we have “we won, get over it” from the Democrats, and the “party of no” from the GOP. We have “you lie” from a GOP Representative, and “they want you to die” from a Democrat Representative. We have lies, spin, deception and scare tactics from both parties about what’s in and what’s out. And at the end, we have Democratic leadership buying off members of their own party to get the bill passed in the Senate.

There is much common ground to be had on health care reform issues. But rather than trying to craft a bill that starts from the common ground, the administration and the Democratic leadership have tried to redefine an entire industry and massive portion of our economy, with no consensus within even their own party.

I’ve written before about the budget reconciliation issue that has been proposed to get this bill passed, and I am pleased to see that, at least so far, the Democratic leadership has avoided going this route. As I said in those notes - the Democrats have a virtual super-majority (58 + 2 independents). If you cannot get 3 people to vote with your near-super-majority then maybe, just maybe, the bill doesn’t deserve to be passed.

I call on my representatives to oppose this latest abuse of power. It is better that nothing be passed than have this horrid process, with its horrid legislation, be brought to such a horrid conclusion.

I am a political independent, and this process has reinforced for me why an am such, and why I will remain such. Please pull back from this partisan power play before it is too late.

Sincerely,
dwex

I see via Fox that C-SPAN is calling out the President:

The head of C-SPAN has implored Congress to open up the last leg of health care reform negotiations to the public, as top Democrats lay plans to hash out the final product among themselves.

C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote to leaders in the House and Senate Dec. 30 urging them to open “all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings,” to televised coverage on his network.

“The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of the sessions LIVE and in their entirety,” he wrote.

In a Tuesday afternoon press conference on health legislation negotiations, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to object to the premise behind the request.

“There has never been a more open process for any legislation in anyone who’s served here’s experience,” she said.

If that’s true, that’s about the most damning condemnation of Congress I’ve ever heard from one of its leadership.

In an attempt to prevent future Congresses from overturning provisions of the new health care law, the current bill has some, umm, “interesting” language in Section. 1899A(d) (page 1019 of the 2000 page bill):

(3) LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THE BOARD RECOMMENDATIONS.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, or amendment, pursuant to this subsection or conference report thereon, that fails to satisfy the requirements of subparagraphs (A)(i) and (C) of subsection (c)(2).
(B) LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THE BOARD RECOMMENDATIONS IN OTHER LEGISLATION.—It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report (other than pursuant to this section) that would repeal or otherwise change the recommendations of the Board if that change would fail to satisfy the requirements of subparagraphs (A)(i) and (C) of subsection (c)(2).
(C) LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THIS SUBSECTION.—It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.
(D) WAIVER.—This paragraph may be waived or suspended in the Senate only by the affirmative vote of three-fifths of the Members, duly chosen and sworn.
(E) APPEALS.—An affirmative vote of three-fifths of the Members of the Senate, duly chosen and sworn, shall be required in the Senate to sustain an appeal of the ruling of the Chair on a point of order raised under this paragraph.

Note the requirement for a 3/5 super-majority for Congress to approve changes. There are interesting questions about whether or not the actions of one Congress are binding on future Congresses (a future Congress could just pass a new law revising this provision, one would think).

But that’s not the truly interesting part. This is:

while cloture to end debate on legislation ordinarily takes “three-fifths of all the Senators duly chosen and sworn” (60 senators when all seats are occupied), cloture on any proposed change to the Senate’s standing rules takes “two-thirds of the Senators present and voting,” or 67 senators if all 100 are on the floor.  (Both of these requirements are in Senate Rule XXII.)  Ironically, the two-thirds rule can be easier to satisfy when the active quorum of senators is smaller; it could take as few as 34 senators when a bare-minimum 51 senators are present.  But any time more than 90 senators are present, it will take more than 60 votes to end debate on any statute that works a change in the Senate’s standing rules.  Thus a good argument can be made that the mere 60 votes obtained in the recent cloture vote were insufficient to end debate on the Reid bill—because it contains at least one change to the Senate’s standing rules.

The problem is, though - the Democrats control the parliamentary procedures, and such there is nothing anyone can really do about it. The Constitution is quite clear that each chamber of the legislature is responsible for its own rules, and there’s no way whatsoever any court is stepping into this.

Interesting times we live in, huh?

H/T: The Volokh Conspiracy

How many people remember this little bit from Candidate Obama: