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Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Obamacare
December 23, 2009
Lee Bias News
Obamacare would require Americans to buy government-approved health insurance.
Remember back in June, in President Obama’s major address to the AMA, when he said the following? “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise. . . . If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” In the six months since, there seems to have been a change.

Obamacare would require Americans to buy government-approved health insurance. It would make it illegal to offer choices in insurance plans beyond the handful of very similar ones that the government would allow. It would become illegal to offer new and innovative plans. Under any of the government-approved plans, it would become illegal to pay your doctor directly for more than a certain percentage of your care. Higher deductible, consumer-driven plans would be severely altered or eliminated. By law, a greater percentage of money would have to be paid in insurance premiums, rather than directly for care. Competition and choice would diminish tremendously. One-size-fits-all conformity would rule the day.

At its core, what Obamacare really means is a loss of freedom.

Obamacare would significantly diminish Americans' freedom to control the fruits of their own labors and to spend them as they choose and as they think best. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that American taxpayers would be on the hook for approximately $2.5 trillion for Obamacare in its real first ten years in operation (2014 to 2023) — about triple the false number of $871 billion that the Democrats are spreading. As the CBO conveys, $871 billion only covers the cost of insurance coverage expansions, which is only a portion of the bill. Furthermore, less than 2 percent of the costs for what the Democrats are calling the bill's "first-ten-year costs" would hit prior to the fifth year of that period. So the Democrats are really giving the six-year costs — for insurance coverage expansions alone — and calling them the ten-year costs for the whole bill. Either the Democrats know this and are being deliberately deceitful, or else they don't understand their own bill and are in over their heads even more than it appears.

In exchange for our significantly reduced freedom to contract with others in the manner of our own choosing, and our significantly reduced freedom to control the fruits of our own labor, one would hope that we would at least enjoy a corresponding drop in health-care costs. Instead, the Office of the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) says that health-care costs under Obamacare would rise in relation to current law, becoming 21 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of 2019 in comparison to 17 percent today. Remember when President Obama said that we couldn't continue spending 17 percent of our GDP on health care? For that matter, remember when President Obama talked about the crucial need to bend the health-care cost-curve down, vowing flatly that he wouldn't sign a bill that did otherwise? The CMS Chief Actuary confirms that both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare would bend the cost-curve up.

The CBO also reports that, in its real first twelve years in operation (2014 to 2025), Obamacare would transfer $1.0 trillion from American taxpayers to private insurance companies. Ever wonder why insurers back Obamacare — even though they would no longer be free to control their own product-line? The answer is plain: Obamacare would mandate that Americans buy insurers' product. And to make that mandate more feasible, it would transfer a trillion dollars of Americans' earnings to insurers over a dozen years. That trillion dollars would be funneled through the government and used to help individual people comply with the mandate, but the money would be required to be spent on insurance, and it would therefore end up in the hands of insurers.

The Democrats are not only making disingenuous claims about the costs of their proposal, they are making similarly disingenuous claims about its effects on the deficit. Democrats claim that this massive expansion of government would somehow reduce the deficit. But the CBO says otherwise. The CBO says that unless Democrats follow through and cut doctors' pay under Medicare by 21 percent next year and never raise it back up, the bill would increase the deficit by over $200 billion in its real first decade. How many people think that the Democrats would really cut doctors' payments by a fifth? Certainly the Democrats know that they won't, and yet they are shameless enough to pitch Obamacare as deficit-neutral, despite the CBO’s plain findings to the contrary.

And yet this is just the beginning of the increased deficits. According to the CBO, the Democrats would siphon over $1 trillion out of Medicare and related federal programs in the real first decade of their health-care overhaul. Simply put, they would siphon $1 trillion out of Medicare and spend it on Obamacare. Across the last year, the White House's own budget director, Peter Orszag, has repeatedly and rightly emphasized that Medicare and Medicaid (the latter of which would be expanded dramatically under Obamacare) are already barely-solvent, that their effects on future budget deficits will "swamp" the effects of all other federal programs combined, and that the key to being able to afford them in the future is to bend the health-care cost-curve down. Now the administration is pulling out all stops to try to pass a health bill that would bend the cost-curve up, and is planning to pay for it, in large part, by looting $1 trillion out of a Medicare program that its own Budget Director has made clear is the last place that we should be looking for money to spend elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the CBO openly mentions the possibility that Obamacare could “reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care” for Medicare beneficiaries.

When a "health-care reform" bill would deplete Medicare funds, drive up health costs, and dramatically reduce choice, competition, and personal freedom in health care — while funneling $1 trillion from American taxpayers to insurers (who would now be almost entirely under government control) — one starts to suspect that the motivation is something other than health-care reform. It is. The motivation is to replace millions of private choices with a command-and-control model in which health-care decisions and health-care resources are centrally administered and allocated by the federal government — under the ultimate command, at least initially, of Barack Obama. The motivation is simple and can be reduced to one word: power. And it doubtless has the American Founders, who dedicated their lives to securing liberty, spinning in their graves.

National Review
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    Today Is the Best Tax Day of Your Life
    April 15, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Article about drastically increased taxes for th coming years.

    By:Robert J. Samuelson

    Looking back, we may all remember April 15, 2010, as the day we got off cheaply. Why a growing deficit and increased spending on health care and Social Security nearly guarantee higher tax bills in our future.

    Almost nobody likes tax day, but people may look back nostalgically on tax day 2010 and those of earlier years because, almost certainly, taxes are going up in the future, and they may go up a lot. With hindsight, tax day 2010 may seem almost dreamy.

    Why? For starters, almost half of U.S. households aren't paying any income taxes on their 2009 earnings. The exact figure is 47 percent, says the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, two think tanks. Among elderly households, 55 percent pay no income tax; among all households with children (including those headed by single parents), the nonpaying share is 54 percent. By contrast, only 38 percent of married couples filing jointly don't pay. (Of course, this doesn't mean people pay no federal taxes; about three quarters of households pay more in Social Security payroll taxes than in income taxes.)

    The personal exemption and standard deduction, combined with the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, shield many poor and middle-class families from the income tax. In 2009 they got extra protection from President Obama's Making Work Pay tax credit, which was $400 for single workers (phasing out at $75,000 of income) and $800 for a couple (phasing out at $150,000 of income). Without that credit, probably only 40 percent of households or less wouldn't have paid income taxes. President Obama has proposed that the credit be renewed for 2011. But given the massive federal budget deficits, there's a good chance that the credit will someday expire.

    So that's one pressure for higher taxes. But it's peanuts compared to the real threat: an aging America. As almost everyone knows, the huge baby-boom generation is edging—or collapsing—into retirement. Its first members, born in 1946, turn 65 in 2011, when they will qualify for Medicare. Some have already taken Social Security as early as 62 at a reduced rate. Boomers collecting benefits, combined with uncontrolled health costs, are the underlying engine for rising federal spending and endless budget deficits.

    To which there's at least one obvious solution: raise taxes. By all estimates, the budget outlook is daunting. The latest projections of the Congressional Budget Office reckon the cumulative deficits under President Obama's policies to be $12.7 trillion from 2009 to 2020. In 2020 the estimated annual deficit will be $1.25 trillion, or 5.6 percent of the economy (gross domestic product), despite assumed "full employment" of 5 percent. And the deficits get larger with every succeeding year. Given unavoidable uncertainties, these precise projections are likely to prove wrong. But their basic message seems incontestable: there's a large and growing gap between the government's promises and the existing tax base.

    How big a tax increase would be needed to close the gap? Well, huge. To put things in perspective, all federal taxes (income, payroll, and excise) averaged 18.1 percent of GDP from 1970 to 2009. Under CBO's assumptions about Obama's policies, taxes in 2020 would already be slightly higher, at 19.6 percent of GDP. But on top of that, there'd need to be a further tax boost approaching a third to balance the budget, because spending is projected at 25.2 percent of GDP. Needless to say, this would be the largest tax burden in U.S. history, even including World War II.

    A recent study by Rosanne Altshuler, Katherine Lim, and Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center shows what this would mean for income tax rates. Their study uses earlier and somewhat more optimistic CBO projections. Moreover, the study assumes only that the budget deficit is cut to 2 percent of GDP—not that it's balanced. Still, income tax rates would have to rise sharply to reach even this goal. If all income tax rates were increased proportionately, today's lowest rate of 10 percent would go to 15 percent and the highest rate of 35 percent would go to 52 percent. If only today's top two tax rates of 33 percent and 35 percent were raised, the new top rates would be 86 percent and 91 percent. At those astronomical levels, the study says, the well-off and wealthy would work less and pursue aggressive tax avoidance. Tax revenues would suffer.

    These bleak estimates demonstrate why politicians of both parties have avoided confronting the government's long-term budget deficits. Anything they might do—raising taxes or cutting retirement benefits such as Social Security and Medicare—risks a public backlash. Some experts urge new taxes, such as a value-added tax or energy taxes. Others talk of "broadening" the income-tax base by eliminating or reducing tax breaks (deductions, credits, or exemptions). But of course, none of these steps would be popular. Hardly anyone wants to pay higher taxes, and most big tax breaks (the home-mortgage interest deduction, credits for college tuition, the charitable deduction) benefit major constituencies.

    Almost all the pressures on taxes are in the same direction: up. It will be hard for President Obama to keep his promise not to raise taxes on households with incomes below $200,000 (for singles) and $250,000 (for couples). It will be hard for economic conservatives or the tea party to achieve meaningful tax reductions. Just about everyone will be tempted to deplore federal budget deficits—and do nothing about them. But this escape route may close; many economists warn that endlessly large deficits risk big jumps in interest rates. Someday, higher taxes may be unavoidable.

    So, the lesson for tax day 2010 is simple: enjoy it while you can. It's not going to get any easier.

    Newsweek
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    Health Care's History of Fiscal Folly
    April 08, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Article about the history of other healthcare reform policies that have ended badly.

    By Peter Sunderman

    The Affordable Care Act—otherwise known as ObamaCare—isn't the first attempt to expand health insurance coverage in America. Before Washington passed its law, a number of states took smaller-scale cracks at the job—each of which proved far more expensive than planned. As the nation dives further into debt, the destabilizing fiscal effects of those programs don't bode well for how ObamaCare will shape the U.S. budget.

    As spectacular failures go, it's hard to do worse than Tennessee. This early state attempt to dramatically increase health coverage, dubbed TennCare, started off promisingly. In 1994, the first year of its operation, the system added half a million new individuals to its rolls. Premiums were cheap—just $2.74 per month for people right above the poverty line—and liberal policy wonks loved it. The Urban Institute, for example, gave it good marks for "improving coverage of the uninsurable or high-risk individuals with very limited access to private coverage." At its peak, the program covered 1.4 million individuals—nearly a quarter of the state's population and more than any other state's Medicaid program—leaving just 6 percent of the state's population uninsured.

    But those benefits came at a high price. By 2001, the system's costs were growing faster than the state budget. The drive to increase coverage had not been matched by the drive to control costs. Vivian Riefberg, a partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Company, described it as having "almost across the board, no limits on scope and duration of coverage." Spending on drug coverage, in particular, had gone out of control: The state topped the nation in prescription drug use, and the program put no cap on how many prescription drugs a patient could receive. The result was that, by 2004, TennCare's drug benefits cost the state more than its entire higher education program. Meanwhile, in 1998, the program was opened to individuals at twice the poverty level, even if they had access to employer-provided insurance.

    In other words, the program's costs were uncontrolled and unsustainable. By 2004, the budget had jumped from $2.6 billion to $6.9 billion, and it accounted for a quarter of the state's appropriations. A McKinsey report projected that the program's costs could hit $12.8 billion by 2008, consuming 36 percent of state appropriations and 91 percent of new state tax revenues. On the question of the system's fiscal sustainability, the report concluded that, even if a number of planned reforms were implemented, the program would simply "not be financially viable." 

    Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen declared the report "sobering," and, rather than allow the state to face bankruptcy, quickly scaled the state back to a traditional Medicaid model, dropping about 200,000 from the program in a period of about four months. Though the state still calls its Medicaid program TennCare, Bredesen's decision to scale back effectively shut the program down. In 2007, he told the journal Health Affairs, "The idea of TennCare, as it was implemented, failed."

    Maine took a different route to expanding coverage, but it also resulted in failure. In 2003, the state started Dirigo Care, which, it was promised, would cover each and every one of the state's 128,000 uninsured by 2009. The program was given a one-time $53 million grant to get things started, but was intended to be eventually self-sustaining. It wasn't. Indeed, the program managed the neat trick of drastically overshooting cost projections while drastically undershooting coverage estimates.

    In 2009, the year in which the program was to have successfully covered all of the uninsured, the uninsured rate still hovered around 10 percent—effectively unchanged from when the program began. Taxpayers and insurers, however, had picked up an additional $155 million in unexpected costs—all while the state was wading deeper into massive budget shortfalls and increased debt. The program has not been shut down, but because expected cost-savings did not materialize, it's been all but abandoned. As of September 2009, only 9,600 individuals remained covered through the plan.

    And then there is the Massachusetts plan, the model for ObamaCare. The state's health care program has successfully expanded coverage to about 97 percent of the state's population, but the price tag may be more than the state can bear.

    When the program was signed into law, estimates indicated that the cost of its health insurance subsidies would be about $725 million per year. But by 2008, those projections had been revised. New estimates indicated that the plan was to cost $869 million in 2009 and $880 million in 2010, an upwards increase of nearly 20 percent. More recently, the governor's office announced a $294 million shortfall on health care funds, and state health insurance commissioners have warned that, on its current course, the program may be headed for bankruptcy. According to an analysis by the Rand Corporation, "in the absence of policy change, health care spending in Massachusetts is projected to nearly double to $123 billion in 2020, increasing 8 percent faster than the state’s gross domestic product (GDP)." The state's treasurer, a former Democrat who recently split with his party, says that the program has survived only because of federal assistance.

    Defenders of the program argue that it's not really a budget buster because the state's budget was already in trouble. But for those worried about ObamaCare's potential effects on the federal budget, that's hardly comforting. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has warned that, without significant change, the U.S. fiscal situation is "unsustainable," with publicly held debt likely to reach a potentially destabilizing 90 percent of GDP by 2020. Democrats managed to get the CBO to score ObamaCare as a net reduction in the deficit, but those projections are tremendously uncertain at best. As Alan Greenspan warned last weekend, if the CBO's estimates are wrong, the consequences could be "severe".

    The history of health coverage expansion should make us worry. If ObamaCare's actual fiscal effects look anything like previous efforts to expand health coverage, the federal budget is in for a world of hurt.

    Reason

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    The End of The Road for Barack Obama?
    March 09, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    An assessment of Obama's 1st year in office.

     

    By Simon Heffer

    It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

    Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth – a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable – and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama's own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician – a Democrat and a supporter of the President – told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people. Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity: The Wire is only just fictional.

    Last Thursday the House of Representatives passed a jobs Bill, costing $15 billion, which would give tax breaks to firms hiring new staff and, through state sponsorship of construction projects, create thousands of jobs too. The Senate is trying to approve a Bill that would provide a further $150 billion of tax incentives to employers. Yet there is a sense of desperation in the Administration, a sense that nothing can be as efficacious at the moment as a sticking plaster. Edward B Montgomery, deputy labour secretary in the Clinton administration, now spends his time on day trips to decaying towns that used to have a car industry, not so much advising them on how to do something else as facilitating those communities' access to federal funds. For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one. This massive state spending gives rise to accusations by Republicans, and people too angry even to be Republicans, that America is now controlled by "Leftists" and being turned into a socialist state.

    "Obama's big problem," a senior Democrat told me, "is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN." The Fox network is a remarkable cultural phenomenon which almost shocks those of us from a country where a technical rule of impartiality is applied in the broadcast media. With little rest, it pours out rage 24 hours a day: its message is of the construction of the socialist state, the hijacking of America by "progressives" who now dominate institutions, the indoctrination of children, the undermining of religion and the expropriation of public money for these nefarious projects. The public loves it, and it is manifestly stirring up political activism against Mr Obama, and also against those in the Republican Party who are not deemed conservatives. However, it is arguable whether the now-reorganising Right is half as effective in its assault on the President as some of Mr Obama's own party are.

    Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism. The sound of the squealing of brakes is now audible all over the American press; but the attack is being directed not at the leader himself, but at those around him. There was much unconditional love a year or so ago of Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's Chief of Staff; oleaginous profiles of this Chicago political hack, a veteran of that unlovely team that polluted the Clinton White House, appeared in otherwise respectable journals, praising the combination of his religious devotion, his family-man image, his ruthless operating technique and his command of the vocabulary of profanity. Now, supporters of the President are blaming Mr Emanuel for the failure of the Obama project, not least for his inability to construct a deal on health care.

    This went down badly with friends of Mr Emanuel, notably with Mr Emanuel himself. His partisans, apparently taking dictation from him, have filled newspaper columns and blogs with uplifting accounts of the Wonder of Rahm: as one of them put it, "Emanuel is the only person preventing Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter". They attack other Obama "sycophants", such as David Axelrod, his campaign guru, and Valerie Jarret, a long-time friend of Mrs Obama and a fixer from the office of Mayor Daley of Chicago who now manages – or tries to manage – the President's image. These "sycophants" have, they argue, tried to keep the President above politics, letting Congress run away with the agenda, and gainsaying Mr Emanuel's advice to Mr Obama to get tough with his internal opponents. This naïve act of manipulation has brought its own counter-counterattack, with an anti-Emanuel pundit drawing a comparison with our own Prime Minister and ridiculing the idea that Mr Obama should start bullying people too.

    The root of the problem seems to be the management of expectations. The magnificent campaign created the notion that Mr Obama could walk on water. Oddly enough, he can't. That was more Mr Axelrod's fault than Mr Emanuel's. And, to be fair to Mr Emanuel, any advice he has been giving the President to impose his will on Congress is probably well founded. The $783 billion stimulus package of a year ago was used to further the re-election prospects of many congressmen, not to do good for the country. America's politics remain corrupt, populated by nonentities whose main concern once elected is to stay elected; it seems to be the same the whole world over. Even this self-interested use of the stimulus package appears to have failed, however. Every day, it seems, another Democrat congressman announces that he will not be fighting the mid-term elections scheduled for November 2. The health care Bill, apparently so humane in intent, is being "scrubbed" (to use the terminology of one Republican) by its opponents, to the joy of millions of middle Americans who see it as a means to waste more public money and entrench socialism. For the moment, this is a country vibrant with anger.

    A thrashing of the Democrats in the mid-terms would not necessarily be the beginning of the end for Mr Obama: Bill Clinton was re-elected two years after the Republicans swept the House and the Senate in November 1994. But Mr Clinton was an operator in a way Mr Obama patently is not. His lack of experience, his dependence on rhetoric rather than action, his disconnection from the lives of many millions of Americans all handicap him heavily. It is not about whose advice he is taking: it is about him grasping what is wrong with America, and finding the will to put it right. That wasted first year, however, is another boulder hanging from his neck: what is wrong needs time to put right. The country's multi-trillion dollar debt is barely being addressed; and a country engaged in costly foreign wars has a President who seems obsessed with anything but foreign policy – as a disregarded Britain is beginning to realise.

    There are lessons from the stumbling of Mr Obama for our own country as we approach a general election. Vacuous promises of change are hostages to fortune if they cannot be delivered upon to improve the living conditions of a people. The slickness of campaigning that comes from a combination of heavy funding and public relations expertise does not inevitably translate into an ability to govern. There is no point a nation's having the audacity of hope unless it also has the sophistication and the will to turn it into action. As things stand, Barack Obama and America under his leadership do not.

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    Republicans cast doubts on Senate Parliamentarian
    March 04, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Reconciiation not looked on favorable by Repub.

    By: Manu Raju

    Senate Republicans are waging a pre-emptive strike against the Senate’s parliamentarian — a hitherto little-known official who could determine the fate of the Democrats’ health care reform efforts.

     

    In interviews with POLITICO, several Republican senators and aides cast Parliamentarian Alan Frumin — a 33-year veteran of the Senate — as someone who is predisposed to side with the Democrats if they attempt to use the reconciliation process to pass parts of their bill.

     

    “I think clearly the majority leader has his ear, and I’ve got concerns,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). “I think if he does not look at that very careful — reconciliation is supposed to be very narrowly defined, large legislative things don’t seem to fit in those parameters — I would think that reconciliation would make or break the perception of his objectivity.”

     

    To back up their claims against Frumin, Republicans point to a decision he made last year when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced an amendment that would have created a single-payer health care system. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) tried to force clerks to read the entire 767-page amendment on the floor, but Frumin allowed Sanders to withdraw the amendment without the extended reading.

     

    Democrats say Frumin’s decision was supported by a 1992 precedent. Republicans say it violated “Riddick’s Rules of Procedure” — and that Frumin feels free to rule however he chooses.

     

    “I think most people don’t trust him,” said a senior GOP official who regularly works with the parliamentarian.

     

    If a relatively anonymous Senate official rarely attracts this level of vitriol, it’s only because the stakes are rarely this high: If Frumin allows the Democrats to move their bill through the reconciliation process, they’ll need just a simple, 51-vote majority for passage and won’t need to overcome the 60-vote cloture hurdle.

     

    The reconciliation process has been used — by members of both parties — 22 times since 1974. But Republicans say that if Frumin allows Democrats to push through health care reform using reconciliation, he’ll experience a personal backlash and the Republicans will bring the Senate to a halt with procedural maneuvers of their own.

     

    “I personally think he’s an honest man, but we’ll see,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). “I don’t think he’s ever been tested like this. He’d be crazy to not follow the rules and to rule properly. If he didn’t do that, he’d lose all respect.”

     

    Hatch, one of the longest-serving senators, said that Democrats will try to “bully [Frumin] and try to get him to make a ruling he wouldn’t ordinarily make.”

     

    But Democrats say the Republicans are the ones doing the bullying — and that they are simply trying to create the perception that the fix is in even before Frumin has ruled. 

     

    “Fairness is in the eye of the beholder,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who as chairman of the Budget Committee will play a lead role in negotiating the measure through Congress. He noted that Frumin has served under Democratic and Republican majorities in the Senate. And Conrad argued that the reconciliation bill will merely serve as a “side car” to the Senate bill, assuming that House Democrats can pull together a fractious coalition to pass the measure and send it to the president’s desk.


    Democrats point out that they, too, have often been upset by the parliamentarian’s rulings — and that it’s not clear what, precisely, can get into a reconciliation bill.

     

    “There’s no guarantee,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who served as parliamentarian of the Illinois state Senate for 13 years after graduating from law school in 1969. “If we go the reconciliation route, we will be testing some reconciliation rules and provisions that have never been tested before.

     

    “You’re not always going to be the most popular person as a parliamentarian,” Durbin said. “I believe he’s professional, and I trust he’ll make the right judgment if he’s called on.”

     

    Frumin, 63, is a graduate of Georgetown University law school and has worked in the parliamentarian’s office since 1977. In 2001, he took over the top spot after then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott fired his predecessor, Bob Dove. Frumin did not respond to a request seeking comment.

     

    The reconciliation process was created in 1974 as a way to make changes in tax laws and entitlement programs to meet the goals laid out in a nonbinding budget blueprint Congress approves early in the year. Because such changes are often very unpopular, Congress ensured they could not be filibustered in the Senate. And since floor debate in the Senate can be limited to 20 hours, passing health care reform by a simple majority has become a very attractive option for the majority party.

     

    Democrats must show that health care legislation would have a budgetary impact in order to meet the “Byrd rule,” so named because Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) led efforts to create the rule nearly three decades ago. Democrats have engaged in closed-door negotiations with Frumin and three other members of the parliamentarian’s office to determine which health care provisions could fit into the reconciliation bill — sessions known on the Hill as the “Byrd bath.”

     

    Some Republicans said this week that they were optimistic Frumin would rule fairly.

     

    “I hope he won’t bend to political influence as the whole debate of health care and reconciliation comes on,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), No. 4 in the GOP leadership. “But I think at least from what I’ve seen so far, he’s doing everything he can to be as even-handed and fair about it as possible.”

     

    But others say the rules of reconciliation are clear — and that they’ll be watching closely to make sure Frumin follows them.

     

    “I think we understand what is allowable under the Byrd rule and what is not,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), vice chairwoman of the Republican Conference. “It certainly is going to depend on his interpretation of that, and if his interpretation veers from what has been outlined in the past, I think that there will be some criticism.”

     

    Hatch put it more starkly, saying Democrats would try to “brutalize the process” — knowing that if the parliamentarian is “dishonest,” then they “can just about do whatever they want to.”

     

    “If that happens, then ‘Katy bar the door,’” he said. “It’s outright animosity between the two parties.”  

    POLITICO

     

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    Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top
    February 20, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Writer gives look at Rahm Emanuel.
    February 21 2010

    By Dana Milbank

    Let us now praise Rahm Emanuel.

    No, seriously.

    It is the current fashion to blame President Obama's disappointing first year on his chief of staff. "First, remove Rahm Emanuel," writes Leslie Gelb in the Daily Beast, because he lacks "the management skills and discipline to run the White House."

    The Financial Times's Ed Luce reports that the "famously irascible" Emanuel has "alienated many of Mr. Obama's closest outside supporters," while the New America Foundation's Steve Clemons lumps Emanuel in with the "Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama Presidency."

    They join liberal interests who despised Emanuel long before he branded them "retarded." Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, together with conservative activist Grover Norquist, demanded a Justice Department investigation into Emanuel, who is "far too compromised to serve as gatekeeper to the president."

    As Emanuel would say: What the [expletive deleted]?

    Clearly, "Rahmbo" has no shortage of enemies in this town, and with Obama's approval rating dipping below 50 percent, they have ammunition. But sacking Emanuel is the last thing the president should do.

    Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.

    Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.

    Obama's problem is that his other confidants -- particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod -- are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn't dirty his hands in politics.


    The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel's counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn't politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn't met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

    Obama's greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.

     

    The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.

    Had it gone Emanuel's way, a politically popular health-care bill would have passed long ago, leaving plenty of time for other attractive priorities, such as efforts to make college more affordable. We would have seen a continuation of the momentum of the first half of 2009, when Obama followed Emanuel's strategy and got 11 substantive bills on his desk before the August recess.

    Instead, Congress has ground to a halt, on climate legislation, Wall Street reforms and virtually everything else. Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers didn't: that bite-sized proposals add up to big things.

    Contrast Emanuel's wisdom with that of Jarrett, in charge of "intergovernmental affairs and public engagement" -- two areas of conspicuous failure. Jarrett also brought in Desiree Rogers as White House social secretary; the Salahi embarrassment ensued. Then there's Gibbs. It's hard to make the case that you're a post-partisan president when your on-camera spokesman is a hyper-partisan former campaign flack.

    No wonder Emanuel has set up his own small press operation and outreach function to circumvent the dysfunctional ones that Jarrett and Gibbs run. Obama needs an old Washington hand to replace Jarrett and somebody with gravitas on the podium to step in for Gibbs.

    The failure of the president's message also reflects on his message maven, Axelrod, who is an adept strategist but blinded by Obama love. A good example was Obama's unproductive China trip in November. Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod went along as courtiers; Emanuel remained at his desk in Washington, struggling to keep alive the big health-care bill that he didn't want in the first place.

    In hiring Emanuel, Obama avoided the mistakes of his Democratic predecessors, who first gave the chief of staff job to besotted loyalists. Now in trouble, Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action. Rahm should stay.

    Washington Post

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    Democrats' Heathcare Strategy
    February 20, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Overview of new healthcare strategies.
    February 19th 2010

    ZOMBIE CARE

    President Barack Obama is expected to reveal a new proposal for health care in the next few days, a way to revive the reform effort. The White House hints that the proposal might — gasp — include some Republican ideas.

    The president has also invited Republicans to a health care brainstorming summit next week. It will be televised.

    So does the president want a genuinely new approach to health care, or has he just decided that he needs a new political approach to sell an old package the public has come to distrust?

    There's one way for Democrats to start restoring trust. They could formally swear off using the legislative trick called "reconciliation." Right now, they're clinging to it as a back-door way to shove their much-maligned health care plans through Congress.

    The House and Senate have passed different versions of health care, but they don't much like each other's bills. The public doesn't like either of the bills. While Democratic leaders were haggling over what to do next, the whole effort flatlined when Republican Scott Brown won a special Senate election in Massachusetts.

    So their bills are like zombies, floating in the netherworld. Not quite dead, clinging to life only because Democratic leaders keep whispering about this legislative maneuver called reconciliation.

    It's a complex, lightly used budget-related gambit that "was never designed for this purpose," says Robert Dove, the Senate's parliamentarian emeritus who helped create the process.

    Democrats no longer have 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a Republican filibuster. But reconciliation could allow them to do just that.

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been talking up the prospect of using this legislative sleight-of-hand. Pelosi told Roll Call that the Democrats have to convince Americans that there's nothing "extraordinary" about it. "It would be a reflection on us if we could not convince people that this is not an unusual place to go," she said.

    The tactic could be used in different ways. The House could approve the Senate's version of health care reform. Then both chambers could immediately pass a second bill — using the reconciliation process to expedite it — that would include changes the House demands in the Senate bill.

    There's a problem: Trust. House Democrats don't trust Republicans, of course. But they also don't trust their colleagues in the Senate to pass the changes. So House and Senate Democrats are locked in a procedural scrum, trying to figure out how all of this might work.

    There's talk about approving the changes first, then having the House vote on the Senate health care bill. But then they'd be changing a law that didn't yet exist. Hmmmm. Problem. Another zombie.

    Yes, it is convoluted. Confusing. And unnecessary.

    The Democrats need to reconcile themselves to what Americans are telling them about these health care bills: They're too complicated and too expensive.

    If Democratic leaders use a parliamentary tactic to force into law a health care plan that has engendered deep distrust in the public, you won't have to call it ObamaCare. You can call it ZombieCare.

    Chicago Tribune
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    Obama Should Try Governing From the Center
    February 20, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Overview of congressional bailout.
    February 20th 2010

    By Rich Lowry

     

    The ancient Israeli high court made it a practice, Justice Antonin Scalia notes, to invalidate death penalties if they were pronounced unanimously - on the assumption that something must be wrong. The same rule of thumb should apply to the unanimous pontifications of the political class, which now insists with one voice that "the system is broken."

    This line had been gaining traction even prior to the retirement of Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who joined the Broken Brigades by saying as he quit that "Congress is not operating as it should."

    Everyone agrees - a surefire sign that something is amiss.

    Consider the recent record. In the fall of 2008, the U.S. financial system stood on the verge of collapse. Then-treasury secretary Hank Paulson went to Congress with a $700 billion bailout package that was politically unpopular, ideologically uncongenial to both sides, and sadly necessary.

    It passed on strong bipartisan votes. Although the package was poorly conceived and quickly abused by the executive branch, it served its purpose. When Pres. Barack Obama says he saved us from another Great Depression, what he means is that Congress passed a rescue months before he took office. If Congress did nothing else for the next four years, this would be a redeeming accomplishment.

    But it did much more, for better or (almost certainly) worse. Within four weeks of Obama taking office, it passed a sprawling $787 billion stimulus bill. It followed up with a massive omnibus appropriations bill increasing spending by 8 percent. It passed an expansion of S-CHIP, costing another $35 billion. It killed the F-22 fighter program.

    "If we stopped today," Obama bragged in October, "this legislative session would have been one of the most productive in a generation." Just a few months ago, liberal pundits such as Jacob Weisberg ("Obama's Brilliant First Year") and Robert Shrum ("For Obama, Success Is at Hand") were marveling at governance in the Age of Obama.

    All these assessments were made against the backdrop of health-care reform's presumed inevitability. Once it faltered, James Madison's handiwork supposedly collapsed in a pitiful heap.

    Of course, the Madisonian system is explicitly meant to frustrate an inflamed legislative majority bent on passing sweeping social legislation for which there's limited popular support. It's not that nothing can get done in Washington; it's that Obama wouldn't settle for what could get done. He turned his back on what history has shown to be the best template for liberal action on health care: salami-slice steps toward ever more government.

    We've heard how it takes 60 votes to get anything done in the Senate. But prior to Scott Brown, Obama had 60 votes. He couldn't forge a consensus within his own party because he never convinced his base to settle for anything less than the outer edge of the possible. And here the example of Evan Bayh is telling.

    A former leader of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Bayh cravenly submitted to the Left. The former hawk opposed the Iraq surge, and the reputed fiscal conservative cast party-line votes in favor of the stimulus and Obamacare. If he thought he'd be rewarded with national office, he was bitterly disappointed; if he thought the center of his party would survive if no one besides Joe Lieberman fought for it, he was sorely mistaken.

    Obama wouldn't tame the impatient Left because he's part of it. After he won in 1964, Lyndon Johnson told his aides he'd won by 16 million votes and would lose a million votes' worth of support every month, so he had to act fast.

    Obama made the same calculation, but on behalf of an agenda that wasn't popular. If people had been persuaded of its merits, Obama could have made Republicans pay the price for obstruction. "Public sentiment is everything," Abraham Lincoln said. "With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed."

    If Obama tries to govern from the center, he'll find the system magically restored to health. Otherwise, it will look more miserably broken by the day.

    Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

    © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

    Real Clear Politics


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    Could Nancy Pelosi Lose Control of the House?
    January 28, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Looking at the current bills passed and the friction between Democratic bodies.

    January 28, 2010

    By Jay Coast

    At its essential level, a political party is an extra-governmental conspiracy to control the government. Our constitutional system disperses power across three branches, two chambers of Congress, and federal, state, and local levels. The parties are centralizing forces, trying to unite all governmental power under the party banner. They accomplish this task when conspiring officials across the government coordinate their activities with others whose views are similar.

    To be successful, a conspiracy requires a shared belief among the conspirators that their interests are linked - something to the effect of, "Whatever happens, we sink or swim together." This is really the only glue that binds a political party together. American party structures are very weak; partisans participate in the "conspiracy" only if they believe it will help them in the long run.

    For some time, it's been clear that the efforts to pass the health care bill have tested the Democrats' ability to conspire. With the bill's apparent failure, stories abound suggesting backbiting among party leaders across branches of government. This was the report in a recent Politico story:

    President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be all smiles as the president arrives at the Capitol for his State of the Union speech Wednesday night, but the happy faces can't hide relationships that are fraying and fraught.

    The anger is most palpable in the House, where Pelosi and her allies believe Obama's reluctance to stake his political capital on health care reform in mid-2009 contributed to the near collapse of negotiations now.

    But sources say there are also signs of strain between Reid and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and relations between Democrats in the House and Democrats in the Senate are hovering between thinly veiled disdain and outright hostility.

    Senate Democrats are mad at House Democrats. House Democrats are mad at Senate Democrats. And everybody is mad at the President. This is not the mark of a well-functioning conspiracy!

    But things could get worse. House roll call votes from late in 2009 suggest that there might be a backbench revolt brewing that could undermine Democratic control of the government.

    Remember, the Democrats control the House only because they can muster the needed 218 votes to pass legislation or execute procedural maneuvers. That's the essence of the House conspiracy. But, again, it's an entirely voluntary one. If Blue Dogs, moderates, or at-risk members start defecting in large enough numbers, and Pelosi can't pull in the needed half-plus-one of the chamber - she loses effective control of the legislative appartus.

    By the end of December, there was a surprisingly large number of backbench defections. Let's run through a list of the big ones from June onward.

    Democratic Defections.jpg

    These were all partisan votes in that Republicans mostly voted against the Democratic leadership. Two of the bills - HR 2454 (cap and trade) and HR 3962 (health care reform) - were high profile pieces of legislation that attracted a lot of attention. But the rest did not garner nearly as much focus, and several of them are downright obscure. And yet the number of defectors was still high.

    It's striking to see 29 Democrats defect on a concurrent resolution providing for the adjornment of Congress. Or how about 39 Democrats defecting on a bill "to permit continued financing of government operations." That's an increase of the debt limit. How could so many vote against it? After all, the House voted through all the spending that required an increase in the debt limit. Yet Pelosi could only muster 218 Democrats to do what absolutely, positively had to be done!

    This is the mark of a partisan conspiracy that is in some jeopardy.

    All of these bills passed, defectors aside. Yet the concern for Democrats should be that, as we approach the 2010 midterm, the number of defectors begins to hit 40 or more. That will happen if Democratic backbenchers sense a need to put more distance between themselves and the leadership. In that case, the Democrats will need Republican votes. They got enough on cap-and-trade, but the GOP caucus might not be so amenable in the future.

    Something like this happened in the summer of 1994. Rich Lowry referenced it on the Corner recently. What happened was that, in the course of passing President Clinton's crime bill, the Democratic leadership suffered huge defections on what should have been a worry-free procedural vote. Michael Barone offers a recap in the 1996 Almanac of American Politics:

    [T]oo many Democrats, lulled by the widespread assumption in Washington that Hillary Rodham Clinton's healthcare package or something like it would inevitably pass, failed to separate themselves from this increasingly popular program until it was too late.

    That moment came, ironically, when Democrats were poised to push through a piece of legislation they thought would make them widely popular, the 1994 crime backage. But the House and Senate leadership, trying to please the liberals in their own caucuses who wanted social work and gun control measures more than the large majority of voters who wanted tough law enforcement and punishment, put together a package that House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich could portray as "social work" and "pork." All but 11 Republicans voted against the rule to consider the crime bill, while 58 Democrats, most of them opponents of the control measures insisted on by liberals, voted no also. The Clinton Administration and the Democratic leadership tactic of keeping liberals happy and using their whips to bludgeon enough moderate Democrats to produce 218 votes had definitively failed.

    Ultimately, Democrats won enough Republican votes to pass the crime bill. Yet this simple procedural vote exposed a deep crack in the Democratic foundation, as the party leadership was no longer able to keep 218 members together on crucial votes.

    If something like this happens in the 111th Congress, what would be the result? Simply put, the Democrats would lose effective control of the House. Nancy Pelosi would continue to be Speaker, top Democrats would still hold all of the key committee chairs, but they would be unable to legislate on the hard stuff. They could still get things like HR 4474, the "Idaho Wilderness Water Facilities Act," passed through the House - but on anything with a whiff of controversy, she and the leadership could be in trouble.

    This is something to watch for as we enter an election year with continued high unemployment, a marginally unpopular President, and an economy experiencing only a tepid recovery. It could be a challenge for Speaker Pelosi to keep 218 of her partisans together, and retain effective control over the legislative process in the House of Representatives.

    Real Cear Politics
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    Reality Check: President Obama Gropes for a Strategy
    January 28, 2010
    Lee Bias News
    Reaction to President Obama's State of the Union Address.

    By John F. Harris, 1/28/10 2:22 AM

    President Barack Obama on Wednesday night tacked to the right with appeals for tax cuts for small business and new investments in off-shore oil drilling and nuclear power. He tacked to the left with renewed vows to let gays serve in the military and to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. He sounded at times like a Bill Clinton-style centrist, at others like a bank-bashing populist. He taunted Republicans, and also presented himself as a lonely tribune of cooperation and bipartisan civility in Washington. In a favorable light, his State of the Union speech may have revealed the mind of a leader who has never cared much about traditional ideological categories and is determined to create his own results-oriented composite of ideas from across the spectrum.

    Less charitably, the address could be interpreted as the work of a president who is desperately improvising by touching every political erogenous zone he and his advisers can think of. Under either judgment, however, it was inescapable that his 69-minute speech — for all the rush of words and policy ideas — was a document of downsized ambitions for a downsized moment in his presidency. It was presented to the Congress and a national audience with all of Obama’s usual fluency and brio. There were flashes of wit, as when he noted ruefully that “by now, it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics.”

    And there were flashes of defiance, with Obama delivering what the White House clearly intended to be the headline quote: “We don’t quit; I don’t quit.” But there was no mistaking throughout this box-checking, loosely bundled speech how different the political context in the winter of 2010 is from the winter of 2009. Obama came into office promising to shatter expectations of what was possible in Washington. The talk then was of a presidential “big bang” — health care, global warming, and financial reform legislation all in one year — and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel boasted that his motto was to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.”  With the big-bang strategy officially a failure, Obama’s speech revealed in real-time a president groping for a new and more effective one. The speech was woven with frequent acknowledgements that the laws of political gravity applied to him after all.

    The first and most pressing legislative goals he identified were a comparatively small jobs bill that has passed the House but is languishing in the Senate, and a Bill Clinton-style menu of tax incentives for business.  Health care, the consuming issue of 2009 and the one on which Obama aides insisted they should be judged, did not show up until more than halfway through. Even then, it was on a notably defensive note. He acknowledged of his signature domestic proposal that “the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became,” adding that, “I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people.” Despite a year of presidential speeches and legislative maneuvering, he said, many people are asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” Legislators should pass what he called good policy even if it is bad politics, he asserted. But Obama offered no clarity at all on exactly when or how this would happen after the stalemate caused by the Republican capture of Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat in Massachusetts. His tepid rallying cry: “As temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we've proposed.”

    That line fit the theme of the night. This president was in a political jam when the evening started. And it was hard to see how he was in any less of a jam when the evening ended. In many ways his tone belittled the speech’s substance. There were only a few of the rhetorical acrobatics and lyrical flights that mark Obama’s most cultivated speeches. Instead, the language was more straightforward, more informal, more accessible — the words of a realist rather than a romantic. But if the speech reflected his cramped circumstances, it probably did nothing to alter those circumstances. The president and his aides have been awash in advice for the past few weeks, and the speech sounded as though they had decided to serve up a buffet of all of it.

    For those who thought he needed to take a step to the right and show more outreach to Republicans, there were calls for the parties to transcend “pettiness” and “work through our differences.” He bragged about how he had cut taxes for most families and talked up a spending freeze. For those who thought he needed to show he was listening to the liberals who were most excited about the original promise of his presidency, there was his vow to act on his campaign promise of ending discrimination against gays in the military. He promised that he would move ahead with energy legislation, which includes the politically volatile “cap and trade” provisions to limit carbon emissions, though he did not try to rebut the widespread analysis that there is virtually no chance these will pass the Senate this year.

    For those who thought he needed to stand up to special interests and tell big bankers where to get off, he did just that. He promoted a proposed new fee on banks and crowed, “I know Wall Street isn't keen on this idea, but if these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again, they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need.” For those who thought Obama needed to be more modest and contrite, he delivered just that — saying he “deserved” some of his “political setbacks.” He did the same for those who thought he should be less detached and project a more human connection to the lives of real people. There were references to the letters from average Americans he reads nightly and to the struggles of Allentown, Pa., and Elyria, Ohio, and Galesburg, Ill.

    It was overwhelmingly a domestic policy address. Though the president was absorbed for months in 2009 with his review of policy in Afghanistan, where 100,000 U.S. troops now serve, the war there was dealt with in two paragraphs. Iraq also came at the end, with a reference that was brief but resounding about his long-term goal: “But make no mistake: This war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.” A speech with parts to satisfy so many different constituencies and perspectives could not fully satisfy very many people. This was reflected in the early reaction.

    Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) criticized the president for continuing to express willingness to work with Republicans, arguing that Obama should have been more forceful about calling the Republicans out for obstruction.

    "The fact is, we have an opposition determined to bring him down," McDermott said. "I don't know when he's going to get the message. ... They're not going to help him at all. Watch. I've been doing this a long time." On the other hand, Rep. Joe Wilson — the South Carolina Republican who gained notoriety last year by shouting “You lie!” during an earlier Obama speech to Congress — was staying positive.

    “On the issue of national security, I was pleased that the president reiterated the value of sending 30,000 more reinforcements to Afghanistan," Wilson said. "I very much respect the president’s decision to listen to our commanders on the ground. ...” Another conservative was much less complimentary. On POLITICO’s Arena feature, the Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper complained that the speech “seemed to have dozens of authors as it contradicted itself and his policies often and emphatically.

    “He said he didn't want to relitigate the past, when the primary focus of the address was exactly that,” Cooper said. “He said he didn't want to penalize bankers, right after he gloriously announced his punitive tax on bankers who have paid back the U.S. Treasury in full with interest. He said he wanted to control spending, and then rattled off a laundry list of liberal investments.”

    Also on the Arena, Obama got an assist from Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the 2004 Democratic nominee, who said his work with Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut shows that progress on energy legislation is realistic this year. “The inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom that this issue has stalled is dead wrong,” Kerry said. Obama knows his challenge is to get other Democrats to share Kerry’s optimism, not just on energy legislation but on the larger promise of the administration. “To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills,” Obama said.

    Originally on Politico

     

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    Senate Agrees to Morning Vote on Christmas Eve
    December 23, 2009
    Lee Bias News
    Senate will hold the final vote on major health care legislation at 8 a.m. on Thursday — Christmas Eve.
    After arguing for days about whether Senator Grinch E. Grinch was a Democrat or a Republican, party leaders on Tuesday afternoon announced that they had reached an agreement to save Christmas.

    They will hold the final vote on major health care legislation at 8 a.m. on Thursday — Christmas Eve — followed by a vote on raising the nation’s debt limit.

    Then, the seasonal cheer can finally begin, and senators will race to the airport in an effort to catch flights, hoping to beat the big snowstorm expected later that night across much of the West and Midwest.

    Absent any Democratic absences for a procedural vote on Wednesday afternoon, or some other unforeseen development, the health care bill is expected to be adopted.

    The final vote on the health care legislation had tentatively been scheduled for after 7 p.m. on Thursday because Republicans said they would insist on using up the full 30 hours of debate that are allowed under the rules after a filibuster has been cut off. The debt limit vote had threatened to bring senators back to Washington during the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

    The Senate will now hold the last of the procedural votes on health care – to cut off the last Republican filibuster of the bill – on Wednesday afternoon.

    The vote on the debt limit will allow a temporary two-month increase, long enough to prevent the country from defaulting, but guaranteeing that there will be another angry debate over fiscal policy in the early part of next year.

    The scheduling agreement, between the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, will allow the Republicans to say that they pushed the vote right up to Christmas Eve without having to ruin the holiday travel plans of senators and their aides — not to mention the staff in the Capitol that takes no sides in the various legislative fights but often takes a beating at times like this.

    Of course, no sooner had Mr. Reid and Mr. McConnell announced their agreement, than Republicans and Democrats were back at each others’ throats on the Senate floor.

    Senator Roger F. Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, put up a large map highlighting the states of Nebraska, Vermont and Massachusetts to illustrate that those states will get extra financial support from the federal government to help pay for an expansion of Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for low-income Americans.

    Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, joining Mr. Crapo on the floor, demanded that all states be treated equally and asked that all senators unanimously agree to change the legislation to do that. Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, objected.

    NY Times
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      West Virginian Democrats shocked at War on Coal.
      December 23, 2009
      Lee Bias News
      They’re particularly indignant that the President that so many of them supported has decided to let the EPA strangle...
      They’re particularly indignant that the President that so many of them supported has decided to let the EPA strangle their state’s core industry via the selective refusal of permits. Which is not surprising, given that this administration’s hatred of the coal industry was not precisely a secret - but still, they’re upset:

      West Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin III, who supported Mr. Obama’s candidacy, called the EPA moves part of a stealth campaign to stifle the industry.

      “Right now, my belief is that they’re trying to kill off surface mining through regulation what they cannot get done through legislation,” Mr. Manchin told MetroNews Talkline, a West Virginia call-in radio program, earlier this month. In West Virginia, 23 permits are being held up, with other affected states being Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

      His concern is shared by Sen. Rockefeller (also an Obama supporter) - but may I be blunt? Let me be blunt: nobody cares. Maybe West Virginia Democrats would have gotten a better deal if they had flipped the state. Maybe. But the state went strong for Clinton in the primary, and then went strong for McCain in the general, so they’re pretty much worthless by this administration’s standards.

      And, again: this should surprise nobody. The current ruling party’s elites do not want to increase the amount of energy that this country consumes. They want to decrease it, in fact. They are not shy about saying so, either. So there is no excuse for not knowing this all along; and any less at being affronted. Angry, yes - but not affronted.

      Moe Lane

      PS: It should be noted that the Rep. Nick Rahall from Amanda’s article is happy to defend the administration’s hatred of the coal industry. It should also be noted that Rep. Rahall is a 32-year Member of Congress who represents a R+6 district. And he even has a challenger already: Lee Bias, who looks to be very sensible on energy and healthcare policy.

      RedState
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