November 21, 2009

Don't Have a Seizure Over the ObamaCare Cloture Vote...

Hatched by Dafydd

...You'd only have to rely upon ObamaCare to cure you!

This post by John Hinderaker at Power Line is fairly typical of what I've been reading:

Mary Landrieu announced today that she will vote for cloture on the Democrats' government medicine bill tonight. The Democrats now have 60 votes and will be able to pass their version of government medicine.

By great good forture, this is a cross between a crocodile and an abalone *: All that this means is that the Democrats have sufficient votes to invoke cloture on beginning the debate on ObamaCare; it does not imply they will have the votes to end debate and actually vote:

Senate Democrats said they had clinched the votes needed on Saturday to propel major health care legislation to the floor for weeks of full debate, as the majority party’s two last holdouts said that they would not block consideration of President Obama’s top domestic initiative.

Some Democrats and one of the two Independents (Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-CT, 85% Democrat) have committed only to the former and not the latter; Lieberman has emphatically stated that unless there are very significant changes, he will not vote for cloture to end debate and vote.

UPDATE from Politico:

“I believe it is going to be very clear at some point very soon that there are not 60 votes for the current provision in the bill and that the leader and the leadership will have to make a decision, and I trust they will figure out how to do that,” Landrieu said....

Two of those planning to vote yes today – Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) have already said they’d join a filibuster of the bill, Nelson to strengthen its abortion restrictions and Lieberman to stop the public option. Lieberman has said he believes other Democrats would do the same, though none warned of that in remarks Saturday.

Landrieu announced her vote earlier in the day. "My vote today to move forward on this important debate should in no way to be construed as . . .an indication of how I might vote as this debate comes to an end," she warned. "It is a vote to move forward. … But much more work needs to be done.”

That should make it quite clear what today's vote means -- and what it does not mean.

It was practically a foregone conclusion that the Democrats would get enough votes to start the debate; even if a Democrat or Indie planned all along to vote against cloture at the end, thus not allowing it to come to an up-or-down final vote (that the Democrats would be guaranteed to win), he would almost certainly vote to begin the debate: Not to do so would make him look utterly intransigent. A Republican can get away with that because the bill is so lopsidedly partisan, but a Democrat has to seem more open to its consideration.

Everything now depends upon the debate itself -- in particular, which amendments are passed and which voted down. I'm still confident that if the liberals manage to retain any of the following in the final bill:

  • Abortion funding
  • The new marriage penalty, encouraging Americans to shack up instead
  • The massive, unprecedented tax increases during a recession and with double-digit unemployment
  • The half-trillion dollar raid on Medicare
  • The obvious rationing of medical care (already starting with the heavy hand of the government stopping doctors from advising mammograms for women aged 40-50)
  • The legal mandate to buy expensive health insurance (with those who refuse facing prison time yet!)
  • Or of course the public option that will simply detonate all private health insurance

...Then several so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats (plus Joe Lieberman) will revisit the question of cloture at the end.

Be of good cheer; this isn't the end of the fight but only the beginning. If the Republicans can stay unified, then we will only need one, single senator who supports cloture today to oppose it at the end, and we will have stopped this dreadful monstrosity.

And even if they all hold firm, and PinkyCare passes the Senate -- it still must be reconciled with the House version, and that too will be subject to cloture requiring 60 votes.

Finally, I am nowhere near as pessimistic as others on the inevitability of some version of ObamaCare being implemented, even if it passes both chambers and is signed by the president. If the Republicans can take over even a single chamber -- a possibility made much more likely by the passage of a staggering tax, the looting of Medicare, and looming medical-care rationing -- then the GOP can stop the actual implementation of ObamaCare simply by refusing to fund it... and that cannot even be vetoed by Barack H. Obama, because it would be a negative act: They can fail to vote for funding, and that effectively kills it. (In fact, Republicans can even run on a "reverse the vote!' platform.)

So put on your manly gown, gird your loins, and pull up your socks; we still have many bites left at the apple, quite a few more chances to strangle this serpent in the grass. Stopping debate from beginning was always the least likely of all possible ways to kill ObamaCare.

Man up -- we've still got a fight on our hands!

 

* A "crockabalone," of course!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 21, 2009, at the time of 3:03 PM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: Paul

Death to ObamaCare or death by metaphor, a hobbits choice!

The above hissed in response by: Paul [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 22, 2009 5:36 AM

The following hissed in response by: cdor

Dafydd, I know you have at least 11 fact checkers for each of your posts here on this brilliant blog, so pardon my possibly perceived insolence, but are you sure about 60 votes to pass the senate...after reconciliation. I thought that was a majority (51 vote) situation at that point, which,of course, would be impossible to defeat.

The above hissed in response by: cdor [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 22, 2009 7:19 AM

The following hissed in response by: Ken Hahn

This was the critical vote. Both the Senate and the House will debate and eventually pass bills that will not have the public option, abortion funding and other troublesome aspects. Then the worst parts will be added in conference and passed.

Once it passed this vote, it became nearly impossible to stop some form of legislation from passing and Reid, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership will insure it contains all the worst features of both bills. I do not propose to stop fighting this monstrosity but with the purchase of Landrieu and Lincoln the battle is no longer Marathon, it is Thermopylae.

The above hissed in response by: Ken Hahn [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 22, 2009 10:09 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

cdor:

Dafydd, I know you have at least 11 fact checkers for each of your posts here on this brilliant blog, so pardon my possibly perceived insolence, but are you sure about 60 votes to pass the senate...after reconciliation.

They can't use reconciliation now; Reid would have had to put reconciliation language in the bill instructions -- which would have precipitated a food-fight over the Byrd Rule. He didn't, so reconciliation is no longer an option: They need 60 votes for cloture at every major stage.

Ken Hahn:

This was the critical vote. Both the Senate and the House will debate and eventually pass bills that will not have the public option, abortion funding and other troublesome aspects. Then the worst parts will be added in conference and passed.

They need to achieve cloture even after the bill returns from conference, since there will be no reconciliation on this bill. So if they can only get cloture by removing all the odious parts from the bill, they wouldn't be able to stick them all back in and still get cloture for the joint version.

The only question is whether a Democrat (or Independent Joe Lieberman) who voted against cloture because of, say, the public option at an early stage of the bill will still vote against cloture at a later stage, if the bill once again contains the public option. Again, the odds are on our side, because we only need one -- Lieberman, Landrieu, Nelson, or any one of a dozen other possibilities -- to prevent cloture.

I believe the Democrats will manage to pass a bill... but it will be so watered down that even many liberals vote against it on final passage (after voting for cloture). It won't be good, but it won't be anywhere near as bad as any of the bills that have trickled out of either the House (where it passed with only two votes to spare, despite the lopsided Democratic majority) or the Senate (where no bill has yet been tested on cloture, as I explained in this post).

And again, as I said: Contrary to what you read, it is possible -- difficult, but possible -- to undo anything this Congress passes... or even just defund it to death. You can starve an entitlement until it dies, or you can so restrict the jurisdiction and authority of the controlling department that it becomes just a quaint adjunct, like the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Department of the Interior, basically a wholly owned subsidiary of more powerful departments.

Finally, the key portion of this bill, the part that is most likely to torpedo private health insurance in the United States -- I refer to the mandate -- may well be ruled unconstitutional, since it may constitute a "taking," and there may be no grant of rights for the Congress to legislate such a mandate. Thus, the mandate will be tied up in federal court from the moment of passage; it will probably be enjoined until a final decision.

In this instance, the Democrats could be hoist by their own petard by their obstinant refusal to allow insurance companies to sell insurance across state lines... since that would make it virtually impossible to turn around and argue that Congress is empowered to enforce a mandate under the "interstate commerce" clause -- because they previously ensured the commerce cannot be interstate!

There is no way this entire Frankenstein's monster will land on Obama's desk this year; which means Democrats will ultimately have to try to pass this in an election year... and the bill includes something on the order of $700 billion in new taxes plus a half-trillion dollar raid on Medicare and possibly a multi-hundred-billion dollar raid on the (risibly labeled) Social Security Trust Fund.

Plus a huge increase in the deficit, since nobody in or out of Congress really believes in Harry "Pinky" Reid's numbers.

That will itself be next to impossible: What Blue Dog wants to vote for tax increases, body blows to Medicare and Social Security, and a vast increase in the deficit... all in an election year?

But if they wait until the first session of the 112th Congress -- the next non-election year -- they can kiss the whole Ponzi scheme goodbye: They won't even be able to get 218 in the House or 51 in the Senate, let alone 60.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 22, 2009 2:51 PM

The following hissed in response by: Davod

Dafydd:

You are starting to remind me of Joe Scarborough who spends his time mocking conservatives worried about a move to Socialism. The Republic always recovers he says.

Obama and his henchemen, and the majority of Democrats in the Congress, have the Blue Dogs cowed. The Democratic majority in the House and Senate lock the Republicans out of chambers so they cannot debate. Pelosi uses the Capitol Police to stop Republicans attending the Dems announcements.

Oh. I hope you are not relying on parliamentary procedure to save the day. The Dems have the run of the rules committees. They will change the rules.

They do not care what the public thinks or wants.

Absent massive - huge protests and peacefull civil disobediance this health bill will pass as is.

The above hissed in response by: Davod [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 23, 2009 6:52 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Davod:

Well, we'll see which of us is more accurate.

Or maybe not... you didn't define "massive - huge protests and peaceful civil disobedience;" so if we managed to stop this, you can always point to whatever tea parties were held during that period and say, "that's why we achieved victory! Were it not for the tea parties, we would have had government health care for sure."

Well, doesn't matter to me what anybody says, after the fact, was the real cause; I say we're not going to get anything that could reasonably be called ObamaCare; but we will get a bill that the Left will call "health-insurance reform," but which will comprise a few trivial changes that in fact do nothing major (but make things marginally worse).

Whether or not we have massive-huge tea parties. What really matters is a continued slide in voter support for a full-blown National Health Service, à la Great Britain. Rasmussen reports that likely voters now oppose ObamaCare by 56 to 38, the strongest level of opposition they have recorded.

Tea parties and other protests are valuable to the extent they drive support for Obamunism lower, thus putting congressmen in fear of not being reelected if they support it; but there isn't going to be a revolution or overthrow of the System.

I don't believe there ever has been such a revolution in a country that actually had fully participatory democracy (the English colonies in 1776 certainly did not qualify -- remember the cries against "taxation without representation?")

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 23, 2009 12:40 PM

The following hissed in response by: Ken Hahn

Dafydd,
I hope you're right but the willingness to break the rules by the Democratic leadership in the era of Obama is total. From the Americorps IG to ACORN to the laughable 72 hour rule in the House, no Democrat seems to be interested in any limits on their power. I trust Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi about as far as I could throw the Capitol building. Reid has corrupted Landrieu ( not much of a problem, it runs in her family ), Lincoln, Nelson and others. He loses one of them and theres always Collins, Snowe or another squish to go after. Just because the law says he needed to put reconciliation language into the bill, don't believe for a minute he won't ignore the rules if it suits him.

This was the best chance to defeat Castro care. It might still be done but it's going to be harder. Lincoln knows she's done. She'll play coy but she's in Obama's pocket now. And she really wants that Ambassadorship or whatever was promised. Same for Landrieu. Nelson talks a good game, as does Bayh, but they're Social Democrats. They sold their souls to the Jacksons and Sharptons long ago. Lieberman will defect and one of the Maine hair brains will replace him. It's still 60.

I do hope you're right but I'll buy it when I see it.

The above hissed in response by: Ken Hahn [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 23, 2009 10:10 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Ken Hahn:

This was the best chance to defeat Castro care.

No; in fact it was the worst chance, I believe. It's virtually impossible for Democrats to justify not even being willing to debate the bill.

They can justify voting against cloture at the very end, but not the very beginning of the process.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 24, 2009 3:53 AM

The following hissed in response by: Davod

I look forward to being wrong.

The above hissed in response by: Davod [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 24, 2009 7:55 AM

The following hissed in response by: LarryD

Recall the the Catastrophic Care Bill the Democrats passed back during Clinton's day was actually repealed. That too, was front-loaded with pain (taxes and regulations), the goodies were scheduled to come later.

The above hissed in response by: LarryD [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 24, 2009 11:12 AM

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