Health Care Reform Brings Good Lessons in Civics

http://www.janereinheimer.com ^ | Jane Reinheimer

[quintr]

Except for the fact that this focus by the Democrat/Liberals has been a giant waste of time, money and resources, it has been good for the United States because it has awakened a strong interest in Civics in this country.

For instance, I wasn't sure before how that whole reconciliation process worked. I did know that if a bill started out in the House, it had to meet its match in the Senate and if the two didn't match up, the bill had to go to a conference committee for some fine tuning. Until now, I thought that was what the reconciliation process was all about. Now I know that reconciliation has its limits and those limits have to do with budget matters.

I'm glad to see the two-party system working so strongly. Oh sure. The Democrats look like they've gotten this whole health care thing locked up tight. I mean, they've been saying they have enough votes to pass the legislation for months now. "We'll have it done by Thanksgiving," they said. But the Ides of November came and went. Then it was, "We'll have it done before Christmas." And the Ides of December came and went. Then it was before winter recess. Then it was before one of their many recesses. Now it's come down to this weekend. And as of this writing, there still is not the required 216 votes needed to pass the monstrosity of a bill.

Speaker Pelosi told the legislators in Congress that they'd have to vote on the bill before they could see what was in the bill. How's that for transparency? Well, apparently the noise got loud enough to where something was posted on the internet. The world's fastest reader is supposedly reading it as we speak. Actually, I don't care about the world's fastest reader reading it. I do expect my own congressman to plow through it, though.

This new idea of deeming to have passed the senate version of the health care reform didn't seem right to even a freshman civics student. How could that be? And then a congresswoman named Slaughter came up with what she thought was her most brilliant legislative maneuver yet. It's now known as the Slaughter Rule. This is the rule that says the House members don't have to vote for the Senate version of the health care reform. They can pass a reconciliation bill and deem that their vote assumes that the Senate version had passed the House.

Speaker Pelosi favors this idea because she doesn't want her loyal Democrats to have to go back to their districts during the spring recess and face us mean old constituents who keep telling the lawmakers that we don't want this health care reform package. No way. Not now. Not ever. Not when 83% of Americans already have health insurance that they're satisfied with.

Oh, for sure, there's room for improvement. For instance, health insurance premiums keep going up and up and are now in the stratosphere for some policies. But changing the rules and allowing health insurers to compete with one another will do the trick on that one. Health insurance needs to be able to cross state borders. They can't do that at this time. Competition, not legislation, is the answer.

Then there's that other little deal that Senate Majority Leader Reid snuck into the senate version of the bill. One tiny little sentence that says the health care reform can never be repealed. Not ever. Not by any future legislation. Let's see now. According to my dictionary, repeal means to revoke or annul by express legislative enactment. And when the new congress is sworn in, you can bet there's going to be lots of work to repeal a lot of legisltion if this passes. Either that or they'll just write legislation around it that would, in essence, nullify this piece of work. It would kind of be like deeming the health care reform as being repealed.

I suspect that there won't be a majority of Democrats holding the House come November. Or the Senate either for that matter.

Representative John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, is looking very Speakerish these days. He's meeting with other Republicans to come up with some maneuvers of their own. Measures that would honor the will of the American people who are against this reform bill. Then there's Mitch McConnell over in the Senate who's also making a lot of waves. He just may be taking Harry Reid's place, come November. He's had some blistering revelations of his own in the last couple of days about whether the Slaughter Rule is even legal. To paraphrase McConnell, if you change one thing -- even the simplest comma or seemingly insignificant word -- in the Senate version of this bill, the deem to pass and reconciliation doesn't count anymore. And there's every likelihood it won't survive constitutional litigation in the first place.

So back to the Ides of March. The Ides is the day that falls on the 15th of the month in March, May, July and October. All the other months have their Ides on the 13th.

Ever since Julius Caesar was killed by some senators on the Ides of March, ides has come to mean a day that brings a fulfilled prophesy of doom. Seems like n 44 A.D. the Romans had their own version of the Slaughter Rule.

In the meantime, there's a march scheduled this weekend by Tea Partiers in Washington, D.C. This isn't just going to be a big huge gathering like the one that was held there this past summer. No no no. What's planned is for Tea Partiers to completely encircle Washington, D.C. -- all 68.3 square miles of it.

The Tea Partiers are already rallying their way to the Capitol.

[albie]

My daughters civics teacher told her that we are a “democracy”. My daughter said “We’re a representative republic”! She explained the difference, “mob rule” etc and the teacher flunked her. After researching and proving her point via quotes and definitions the grade was reversed to an A and the teacher ended up with an “E” for egg on the face.

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I had a similar experience when I was a freshman in college in a paper I wrote about Viet Nam. My paper took a patriotic stance and very pro military and I got an F. But the teacher gave me a chance to do the paper over so. I did, as an example of reversing a position. I got an A on the second paper. Then I took both papers to the Dean and the teacher was suspended after the semester. But that was a long time ago. I don’t think they suspend teachers for doing that. But the hypocrisy of inviting students to form their own opinions, then punishing them for it if the opinions don’t match the teachers, still exists in our schools unfortunately,

Good for your daughter. Orchids!!

— Jane Reinheimer

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Just a quick modification to the artile above. The tea parties are planning on circling the Capitol Building, not D.C. I told Jane wrong, sorry.

Quint R.

[A.A. Cunningham]

Jane Reinheimer