Posted on 01/04/2010 9:40:03 AM PST by julieee
Dems May Skip Conference Cmte to Push Pro-Abortion Health Care Bill
Washington, DC -- Congressional Democrats are seriously examining the possibility of skipping the formal conference committee process in an attempt to railroad the pro-abortion health care bill through the House and Senate. Bypassing the normal process may allow them to skip procedural votes that could hold up or kill the bill.
http://www.LifeNews.com/nat5837.html
(Excerpt) Read more at LifeNews.com ...
Jeepers Freepers. Can they do this in the House and the Senate? What’s the timeline? Cn we put them off until Jan 19 (Special Senate election in MA)?
Doing at their own peril.
Okay. What goes around comes around.
Somehow, this act of arrogance and abuse of democrat power must be used against them.
Hopefully at least Fox News will run this story as the power play against the people that it is.
I think this is a sign of desperation. Considering that they’ve gotten 60 votes arleady in the Senate and a majority of the House, why might they be taking this route? Must be one or more of the following:
1. They fear losing one or more of the Senators who voted for the bill next time around, meaning that they need some other tactic to get around a filibuster.
2. They fear losing Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts in the January 19 election.
For the life of me, I can’t think of any other reason to take this route.
They also fear losing more Dems in the house — it barely passed at Cao, the Republican for voted for it, says he’s voting against this one. Only 2 Dems have to be turned to send the bill down in flames.
If they don't change anything there is no need for a conference, only a majority vote in the house and the presidents signature.
Oh, I agree. In fact, I read somewhere else that they have already lost a Democrat or two who have exited the House. It’s not a given that they have the votes in the House to get this bill through.
But that prospect does not explain this new tactic, or at least I don’t understand how it does. The Dems seem to be in a rush, and they seem to be worried that they won’t have 60 votes needed to foreclose a filibuster in the Senate. They could lose Dems whether they vote now or in February.
One other explanation could have something to do with Obama’s State of the Union speech, which (as a practical matter) must come between January 19 and January 31. Obama is about 7 points lower now than he was on election day last November when NJ elected a Republican governor. I think there is something to the idea that the Dems desperately want this legislation passed before the SOU, especially if the MA special election is even close, because I think we can be reasonably confident that Obama will be even lower in the polls in late January than he is now. Can you imagine Obama having to deliver the SOU when ...
1) at the least, Brown (R) has put a huge scare into Coakley (D) for Ted Kennedy’s bluest of blue seats; and
2) the polls show even less support for health care reform than now; and
3) Obama is another 3-4 points lower in the Rasmussen poll; and
4) health care reform is STILL not passed?
Moreover, I don’t think Obama’s guys are counting on a scandal-free January leading up to the SOU. There are so many things right now that are precarious that something is likely to come gushing out of the crapper between now and then.
Might this be the tipping point?
You say they'd be voting on the Senate Bill, unchanged -- and all they'd they need is a majority vote in the House, right?
But the vote in the House last time (Nov 7) was 220-215, right?
And if just 3 votes flip, it LOSES --- 217-218. Cao already said he would flip. Stupak is a probable. So Pelosi would gamble it ALL on just a 1-vote margin? When there's another 10-12 pro-Stupak Dems who could flip as well?
Did I miss anything there?
It save than a lot of time, as the potential to slow the bill in the Senate via procedural means is greatly reduced.
The Alabama dem flipping to R.
He already voted NO, so his flip won’t change the count.
DeMint and the GOP objected to the conferees, so the filibuster rule still applies if they play ping-pong. That is, if they change any single comma or word in the House from the Senate bill.
Where is the leadership to schedule a date for the entire coalition opposed to this monstrosity to come to DC or otherwise let their voices be known in the home districts? We don't need to be on defense, we can take the offense.
DeMint and the GOP objected to the conferees, so the filibuster rule still applies if they play ping-pong. That is, if they change any single comma or word in the House from the Senate bill.
Where is the leadership to schedule a date for the entire coalition opposed to this monstrosity to come to DC or otherwise let their voices be known in the home districts? We don't need to be on defense, we can take the offense.
If they don’t follow the will of the people, rules, laws and our constitution, they can do absolutely anything they want.
My questions are........ will we be able to undo all of this corrupt and traitorous nonsense? AND, how much permanent damage will have been done to our country by these traitorous bastards?
The point is that if the bill doesn’t run through a conference committee - if instead the Democrats simply “negotiate” the text of a bill acceptable to 60 Democrats in the Senate - they can proceed more directly to a closure vote as there are fewer procedural tactics available to the Republican minority slow the process.
I know it’s not a popular view here, but in my opinion Senatorial Republicans would’ve been a lot smarter to negotiate a somewhat better bill with the Democrats (for example, the Democrats would likely have been extremely flexible on “tort reform”) - a few “moderate Republicans” in safe Republican seats could have voted with the Democrats, leaving the remainder of Republicans more likely to be faced primary challenges by candidates further from the right or even conceivably replaced by Democrats to complain mightily that they had done everything possible to prevent passage of the bill.
I know this is a highly unpopular strategy here, but there is a huge potential opportunity cost in preceding as the Senatorial Republicans have, for example once the negotiations with with their Democratic counterparts had broken down it became necessary for anyone who wanted have actual influence over the final content of the bill to negotiate exclusively with Democrats - a good way to rapidly lose political power and large amounts of campaign funding, and in the meantime Republicans have forsworn any ability to temper the bill or change its direction or content.
If the strategy 100% consistent opposition proves to be a big winner in 2010, then these costs may have been acceptable.
But that does not produce does not produce very substantial Republican gains in 2010, then this will been the case of the ideal being the enemy of the possible, and conservative voters have to live with a worse health care bill than what might otherwise have been the case.
So while I certainly understand the feelings of people here who simply don’t want to feel that they bear any responsibility at all for the Democratic health care bill, some sort of “reform” is going to pass, the political game is played for real stakes with real voters lives, and feeling good about political or moral purity is a pretty unsatisfactory substitute for political influence - just ask the Democrats who wandered in the wilderness for 20 years until they learned this lesson.
My respectful response:
If the Senate RATS can win one cloture vote, they can win all of them. The important thing is that the House not accept the Senate bill as is, so that the bill has to come back to the Senate and face another cloture hurdle. It won’t take a lot of effort to flip Lincoln, Bayh, Nelson, Dorgan, etc as we approach the November elections. Nelson, of course, is not up until 2012, but if he wants to salvage any future political career, he has to run to safety. There won’t be a Democratic administration in the White House in 2013, so he cannot count on an ambassadorship or appointment to any other federal post. It is my understanding that Nelson is not personally wealthy, so his only fallback is to become a high paid lobbyist like Billy Tauzin.
I do not at all agree with your strategy to negotiate with the RATS to water down this bill. Whether we win or lose the enactment of this monstrosity, I want every Democrat to be the 60th, and decisive, vote for passage — an albatross that can be wrung around each of their socialistic necks in both 2010 and 2012 in every Senate election. My worry was that Snowe would cross over and bolt, giving Reid a veneer of bipartisanship. However, much to his credit, McConnell kept his entire caucus on board. McConnell rarely gets any credit and I think he deserves good marks for this accomplishment.
If enacted, this will be the first time in American history that we have passed sweeping social change on a strictly partisan basis, and the RATS are going to pay politically for this disaster for the next generation.
For example, remember Karl Rove's "K" Street project?
The underlying premise was that if you could create a situation where the only place you could go to influence legislation was on the Republican side of the aisle, money and influence would increasingly flow to an ever stronger Republican majority, while the Democrats would be increasingly starved for money, influence, and eventually even for relevance.
While the implementation was flawed and the expectations overstated, the basic concept probably had a lot of validity, for example this is one reason it's so difficult for third parties to achieve traction in this country, and Rove's plan was essentially to reduce the Democrats to third-party relevance.
However, now we're in a position where the current Republican program is running the K Sreet. strategy in reverse: instead of the Democrats marginalizing Senatorial Republicans, they are marginalizing themselves.
Now, if you can confidently predict - or even just believe - that the strategy is going to produce dramatic Republican gains in 2010 and 2012, then trading current relevance for future influence is a reasonable strategy.
But in my opinion, it's one that carries enormous political risk.
For example suppose that Republicans manage to be highly successful in 2010, which would mean for example reducing the Democratic majority in the Senate by 3 to 4 senators and perhaps - absolute best case - regaining control of the house.
The question is then, what next?
They could certainly completely frustrate Obama's domestic agenda, as the Republicans were able to frustrate Clinton's - but that strategy success hinges on the bet that two years of obstruction and bitter partisan attacks is actually going to improve their electoral position in 2012. IMO, anyone who believes this is a surefire strategy needs to take a careful look at Clinton's popularity ratings during the last two years of his term, And meanwhile, practitioners of such a strategy will be infuriating the major large-scale corporate players in American politics - not something likely to endear them to the same players.
However, if Republicans compromise and bargain with the Democrats to advance the same agendas, they are going to infuriate many of their more conservative supporters. (And somehow, I suspect the Tea Party Republicans are more likely to sit on their hands or vote for third-party candidates than their Democratic counterparts during last few elections, if only because they haven't had yet had the experience of a decade or two out of power).
This to me is the trap in which the Republicans find themselves - they are caught between the need to operate as a party which advances the interests of major big-money players in Washington, and a highly vocal and highly motivated minority who are absolutely sure they are on the side of the angels and are pursuing a program of less, not more, compromise.
So unfortunately, when I look at the underlying trends, I see a paradox: that highly motivated minority can pull the Republican Party as a whole further to the right, but in the mid-term and beyond it can't substantially improve the overall national electoral position of the Republican party - the demographics trends are just wrong for the success of that effort - and it is highly likely that the Republican Party is the only electorally realistic hope for conservatives to advance their agenda.
In fact it appears to me, looking at the numbers, is that this is a trend which would become apparent even earlier had not been for 9/11, unlike a lot of other observers I don't believe that voters so much turned against the Bush administration has that Republicans were fortunate to elect a president with a minority of the popular vote by the skin of their teeth inn 2000, and that the tide would likely have turned 2-4 years earlier absent Bush's enormous electoral boost post-9/11. (On this view conservatives were extraordinarily lucky that Bush and not Gore was in the White House on 9/11, as any president would likely have received an enormous electoral boost in the aftermath).
So, what to do?
My opinion is that at this point there are currently two Republican parties, one of which is a conventional political party of the sort which have shown great durability in American politics in which practices "pragmatic" politics, and one which is highly idealistic and is composed of members who (to paraphrase one senator) "would rather live in a country where 13 Senators were "true conservatives" that a country where 51 of the Senators were were "pragmatic conservatives". The party of Republican idealists is currently in the drivers seat, and is rolling the dice that in fact 51% of the voters are more likely to vote for a "true conservative" than a RINO or a Democrat.
Compromise, for these voters, is anathema.
Meanwhile, the party of pragmatic "business as usual" Republicans is currently in something like near eclipse from a policy standpoint, but if the idealists fail will pretty quickly start to follow the same general path back to power as the Conservative party is pursuing in the UK - but that could require a decade or more.
The idealists are going to get their chance to prove their point - one way or the other - in 2010 and perhaps in 2012.
And while I don't think the odds really where near as good as they think, I'm also convinced that the attempt is going to be the only way to settle the question.
But the idealists need to understand that they need to win - and win really big - to retain influence, because both wings of the party have been reduced to legislative impotence and its resulting diminution of influence by the current policy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.