Posted on 09/23/2009 7:04:56 AM PDT by Reaganesque
With the President and Congress’s plan to pass comprehensive health care reform reaching increasingly high levels of unpopularity, and reconciliation becoming an impediment, the leadership of the Senate is rumored to be preparing a new secret plan to railroad the bill through the Senate in record time by using a seldom used parliamentary procedure.
Their plan is to proceed to a House passed non-health care bill to provide a shell of legislation to give Obamacare a ride to the House then to the President’s desk. Sound confusing? We lay out the steps below, but essentially the Senate would pass health care reform as an amendment to a completely unrelated bill so the Senate and House could act quickly and without further debate. Even worse? Nobody really knows what that legislation looks like but they plan on voting for it anyway.
Right now, the Senate Finance Committee is in the midst of marking up health care reform “legislation.” Due to Senate procedure, what they are actually marking up is a 200+ page conceptual framework of the actual legislation, not a real bill. That means that not only has no Senator even read the bill but, there is a high probability that the bill hasn’t even been written yet. If the Committee sticks to their artificial deadline of completing work by this Friday then they would have passed a conceptual document reforming the nation’s health care system, spending trillions, without ever seeing an estimated 1,500 pages of legislation, which may or may not be written.
The current plan is to start debate on Obamacare as early as next week under the following four-step scenario:
STEP ONE: The Senate Finance Committee will finish work on the marking up of Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) conceptual framework for legislation by this Friday. Baucus has not unveiled final legislation and, according to the Associated Press, he added some new language to the mark up today. AP reports that “under pressure from fellow Democrats, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee decided to commit an additional $50 billion over a decade toward making insurance more affordable for working class families.”
Senators have not been provided any real legislation and are offering amendments this week to Baucus’ 200+ page outline. It is expected that at the end of the process the Senate Finance Committee may produce a bill longer than the 1,000 page House bill that proved so controversial over the August recess. Many Senators are upset that they don’t have final language for a bill, yet still they sit in a Committee Hearing Room this week marking up a draft document that is not in the form of legislative language. The plan is to have this document voted out of the Senate Finance Committee by Friday.
STEP TWO: Next, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will take the final product of the Senate Finance Committee and merge it with the product of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee. This was the late Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) bill, introduced by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), which passed the HELP Committee on July 15, 2009 on a party line vote. Remember, most Senators will still not know what they voted for in the Finance Committee.
STEP THREE: Senator Reid will then move to proceed to H.R. 1586, a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received by certain TARP recipients. This bill was the bill passed by the House in the wake of the AIG bonus controversy and is currently sitting on the Senate Legislative Calendar. Reid will move to proceed, and he will need 60 votes to act on this bill. After the motion is approved, he will then offer a complete substitute bill purportedly including the combined Senate HELP and Finance Committee products. This means that the entire health care reform effort will be included as an amendment to a TARP bill that has been collecting dust in the Senate for months.
STEP FOUR: For this strategy to work, the proponents would need to hold together the liberal caucus of 57 Democrats, 2 Independents (Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont), and a potential new member replacing the late Senator Kennedy. This scenario would most likely be implemented after the Massachusetts state legislature gives Governor Deval Patrick the power to appoint a new Senator and that Senator is seated by the Senate. According to CQ, the state legislature may pass a bill and present it to Governor Patrick by next week.
Once the Senate passes a bill and sends it to the House, all the House would have to do is pass the bill, without changes, and President Obama will be presented with his health care reform measure thereby transforming within a few weeks 1/6th of the US economy. If this plan does not work, the Senate and House Leadership may consider using reconciliation to pass the legislation. For a more detailed explanation of the reconciliation scenario, please see the Heritage Foundation’s Fact Sheet on Reconciliation here or a handy guide on Reconciliation published in Human Events earlier today.
Does this sound like a transparent, bipartisan and effective way to change the way millions of Americans get their health care? Of course not.
The nice phase of the game is over by 2010.
That's when the 2% who will actually ACT will start shooting the bastards and hanging their corpses from lamp posts.
Count on it if this travesty gets passed in this fashion.
What would happen if States started seceding from the Union?
“Buncha RAT Bastards”
Hey, thats my saying! LOL So true though!
We need to encourage everyone to get off their asses and vote! The days of complacency are over.
If the polls are right in that the majority of Americans are conservative, We need to make it so next election!
JMHO
Socialized medicine is every bit as pernicious as you say and our health care system is already dangerously socialized. The Dems desperately want to make a bad situation much worse. The thing is, they can't.
The votes aren't there and they aren't going to be there for any substantial increase in the government's control over health care. The votes aren't there, in large part, because the money isn't there. The government doesn't have it and can't raise it. Even if they managed to roll a shiny new health care program off the lot this year, the repo man would take it back before most of its provisions could take effect. We are going to be dismantling our welfare state in the decades to come because we can't pay for it. Nothing Congress does today can change that reality.
Socialism doesn't work. The left has been able to keep the scam going for years, but it is unraveling now. The socialist idea is dead. It will still twitch for a while, but it can't do a lot more harm.
Keep fighting the good fight, secure in the knowledge that, in the long run we can't lose. Eventually liberty will triumph because our society is deeply committed to it and nothing else works nearly as well. In our current circumstances nothing else will work at all.
Cogent and cohesive.....and correct.
Leni
(a) Affirms that the State of Texas claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution;
(b) Serves notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates, and providing that certain federal legislation be prohibited or repealed.
====================================
SOURCE "Texans Against Government Controlled Health Care"
http://www.notintexas.org/
Facts about the 10th Amendment:
The Tenth Amendment (Amendment X) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791.
The Tenth Amendment restates the Constitution’s principle of Federalism by providing that powers not granted to the national government nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or the people.
Here, here!
If I recall correctly, since all spending bills must originate in the House, the Senate took an unrelated bill that passed the House, passed an amendment gutting the original contents of the bill, and then passed additional amendments replacing the contents with immigration reform.
This "new" bill was then to go back to the House to be passed again there.
-PJ
I don’t know. Could be.
If this is how our “representatives” want to behave, then they no longer server the purpose outlined for them in the Constitution. They are not representatives of the people, and this is no longer a government of, by, and for the people.
This government is a charade, intended to play us against each other, while the “rulers” in DC do whatever they wish to centralize power and money in DC.
They ALL have to go.
Not unless we man every voting site, and count each ballot.
And dip each voter’s finger in purple dye, ala Iraq.
“Not unless we man every voting site, and count each ballot.
And dip each voter’s finger in purple dye, ala Iraq.”
I’m with ya brother!
And therein lies the failure of the plan, there is no way the House will provide the necessary 218. The Black Caucus will not vote unless they get the public option, not the phony co-op stuff, but all-out coverage to every citizen, the first step to single-payer. And Bart Stupak (D-MI) is on record with Pelosi, he has the votes to kill any bill that does not include the Hyde amendment language, Baucus does not -- I don't know if any of these hundreds of amendments does, but at this point, without that, the pro-life folks will deny passage and this is one principle that cannot be bartered away with pork deals.
You are correct in your concern, this is what helped defeat the crummy Amnesty bill, Bush made a deal with a bunch of Senators and totally forgot the Constitutional requirement that all bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House, they didn't use this "amend a bill already passed" maneuver, several members of the House were on record set to kill a law with SC challenge.
If something does pass and is signed with an effective date of 2013, then no, it would not be literally irreversible, because it would mean in 2010, they hadn't yet been able to install all the levers and set up all the new bureaucracy. But should something actually be passed and signed into law now, they would have two years to make a good start on things, it won't be pretty, the upheaval. I'm concerned at the idea of having to trust the GOP to do the reversal, the people who will be in the leadership/chairman roles, due to seniority, they have demonstrated time and again that they do not hold to true, conservative principles and many of them have shown a real disdain for the people, our wishes and viewpoints, unfortunate as that sounds. I wish I felt better about things.
The only answer is no bill, no new law, Glenn Beck's idea of quarantine on Washington.
Landrieu gets daily calls, e-mails, etc.. from me and has for a long time. Many times her voice mail box is full and can’t take any more messages. Louisiana is screaming. I know for a fact she is co-sponsoring the Wyden bill and won’t go public option per se, but it remains to be seen if she’ll go for the Baucus bill. I pray she grows some sense. Wyden bill may never come up for a vote - fine by me as it contains indiv. mandate, state legislated co-op, etc.... Main difference seems to be it’s centered on the state level rather than the fed level. Still too much government intervention in our health care!
Pat Cadell said it on Glenn Beck: The government has become the enemy of the American people.
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