Commentaries
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March 15, 2010
This week will be the last stand for Obamacare, and the trickery that Speaker Pelosi is concocting to get the 2,700-page Senate bill through the House almost defies belief. It’s aptly called the “Slaughter Strategy,” after Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.), who chairs the House Rules Committee. Under this scheme, House members would vote on a bill of amendments to the despised Senate bill, and the Senate bill would be “
deemed” to have passed if this companion bill is approved. This is supposed to inoculate House members, who could say they never actually voted for the Senate bill.
March 12, 2010
Here’s the bottom line: For health reform to become law, House members will have to take a straight up or down vote on the hated, 2,700-page Senate bill. And they have to trust that the Senate will wage and win an incredibly difficult battle to pass a totally separate second health-reform bill to amend the original bill.
March 10, 2010
President Obama will be visiting the St. Louis area Wednesday to garner support for his health reform plan. As Washington prepares for a final bare-knuckled battle this month, the stakes could not be higher. While the president can make a compelling case for action, his assertions about his plan are not backed by facts. Based upon his most recent health reform statements, the president will continue to make arguments refuted by the facts and independent analyses when he visits Wednesday.
March 10, 2010
Talk about hard to swallow. At last Wednesday's White House press conference, President Obama urged Congress to pass his massive health reform bill without Republicans votes. This would be possible only by using a procedural tactic known as reconciliation, which would allow the Democrats to pass their measure with a simple up or down vote. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi support this move.
March 10, 2010
The next act in the drive to pass ObamaCare is the mother-of-all political maneuvers -- in which Democrats will use an incredibly convoluted and possibly unconstitutional process. Things were already arcane: President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been threatening to enact "health-care reform" through the narrow path of budget reconciliation. It's a ploy to allow the Senate to pass "reform" with just 51 votes -- making the election of Scott Brown as the 41st senator against ObamaCare irrelevant.
March 6, 2010
America’s Catholic bishops are being used in a negotiating ploy that could lead to enactment of Obamacare and to federal funding of abortion. Representatives of the bishops reportedly are working with the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress to write legislative language that would “fix” the liberal abortion provisions in the Senate health-care reform bill.
March 5, 2010
The health reform debate can be bewildering, with thousands of pages of legislation and mind-numbing complexity of parliamentary procedures. But none of that matters now. The Congress is just one vote away from passing legislation that would put one sixth of our economy under permanent government control. How can that be when this legislation is so overwhelmingly disapproved by the American people?
March 5, 2010
Only one thing really matters. And that is convincing the House to pass the Senate bill. Everything else is a side show at best. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday the next step is for the House to pass the Senate bill so the process of reconciliation can move forward. The president says he wants this to happen by March 18 — two weeks from now. But if the House passes the Senate bill exactly as written, Obamacare becomes the law of the land. The deal will be done.
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