The GOP Storm on Health Care Begins to Subside (BS! The storm is strong and we'll vote the Rats out)

The last few weeks Senate Republicans were all sturm und drang. “The American people are getting tired of this crap,” Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican told ABC's This Week. “If [Democrats do reconciliation], it's going to poison the well for anything else they would like to achieve this year or thereafter.” Stories were written about how they'd bring down the bill in the Senate, drag out the process, kill the bill.

This week, as President Obama basks in the glow of finally getting health care passed the reconciliation fixes sent to the Senate seem not quite so life-and-death. After all, the Tea Party activists have all gone home, the bill has been signed in to law and many of the fixes – such as the stripping out of sweetheart deals – are popular on both sides of the aisle. “I'm not willing to go so far yet as” to write off all bipartisan cooperation, Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who heads the NRSC, told reporters today. “I still hope that on things like financial regulatory reform we'll be able to see some bipartisan cooperation.

Republicans seem to realize they have lost the momentum, if not the narrative. “What does [filibustering by amendment] do? All that does is, you beat your own drum but you don't accomplish anything,” said Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who once said he planned to offer hundreds amendments – his office now says it'll be more like a few dozen. “We're not up here to delay. If we can't win, we can't win.” Nearly everyone thinks the Senate will adjourn by the end of the week for their Easter recess as planned.

In many ways he is right, moreso because the media will report it this way.

Obamacare is now the law of the land. Nothing the Senators do will change that, unless they manage to place a “repeals the bill” provision into the reconciliation, which they could only do if the CBO re-scored the Senate bill and found it RAISED the deficit, so that repealing it would reduce the deficit.

So, what happens when the Republicans vote AGAINST the repeal of the cornhusker kickback? The media reports that we are trying to protect the special deals. Or that we area voting against something we support (repealing the kickback), simply out of spite and retribution.

The fact is that some, if not many, of the provisions in the reconciliation would make the Senate bill less bad. We are at a new baseline, and the media will work hard to measure us against that baseline.

Meanwhile, many on our side are urging the reconciliation be crushed, simply to get back at the house democrats who thought reconciliation would give them cover. That’s a purely political argument — voting to try to win an election, and would only work if the media didn’t focus on it. But the media WILL focus on it.

Instead, what the senate republicans have to do is sell a story that they are working to make the bad bill better through the reconciliation process, by offering amendments that can’t be spun as anything BUT trying to save more money and make the bill better.

The democrats will have to vote against these, and the republicans can point out that DEMOCRATS aren’t letting them fix the parts of the bill the American people hate.

I would expect that they will try to attack an amendment repealing the individual mandate, and the taxes. The problem is that the things people hate the most are the things that reduce the cost; and reconciliation is all about reducing cost, so an amendment to remove a tax will be rejected as not in order under reconciliation.

This is not an easy game to play. It is amazing that the republicans haven’t used this process — it’s a beautiful way around the 60-vote rule. Any time you want, you just put some shell bill together that everybody votes for, send it back to your majority in the house, and they grab onto it and do “reconciliation” to fix it with all the things you can’t get the democrats to vote for.

Anyway, we are also fools if we think that “repeal alone” is going to win us an election. Like it or not, most americans think there IS something the feds can do to make health insurance better, and MOST republicans are on board with a series of reforms.

So the key is not “we will repeal this law”, but rather “we will REPLACE this law with a health care bill that makes sense, that doesn’t do all the bad things this bill does, and that fixes the problems Americans want fixed”.

Unfortunately, some of those problems aren’t really the government’s job to fix — but that battle is lost, and if we force our candidates to die on that hill, die they will, and nothing will get done. We have a lot of work to do to get 50%+1 of the people back to believing they have responsibility for their own well-being. And until we get there, we won’t win elections telling them government will no longer help.

It’s much easier to build opposition to a specific bill (because there’s always something you don’t like) then it is to build support for action to fix it (because any change could hit something a part of your coalition DID like).

Remember — if the Stupak language was in the bill, the Catholic Church would have urged all it’s members to support this bill. Think how hard it will be to repeal a bill if a good part of our conservative coalition is told by their religious leaders to support it.

There is a point I wanted to make and this thread is probably as good a place as any (I don't do vanities).

Titius Livius, in his History of the Roman Republic, stated that a project's beginnings are an important indicator of how that project will grow and prosper.

He therefore spent a great deal of time reviewing Rome's founding and their early history as subjects of the Etruscans, as subjects of Kings and of the establishment of the republic. He took great care in exposing those events that would lead to the later greatness of Rome.

As American citizens, we too look back upon our founding w/ great pride and reverence. We bank on the integrity and wisdom of our founders we give great credit to those founders for our current successful republic. Contrast the contemporaneous revolutions in France, Haiti, and Latin America. Or for that matter modern revolutions in Russian, China and the many nations of Africa.

So that leads me to the birth of Health Care reform and the nature of its conception. Could any program so inauspiciously conceived possibly bear healthy and positive fruit? Lies, deceit, bribery, extortion; these were the midwives to our epic reformation. A legislative process so corrupted and shoddy that only a third world country could perpetrate.

Time will surely tell.

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