The Speaker of the House and the President have two options right now: hold and lose the vote in the House, or wait and vote after the Senate.

By my own count the Speaker and the President are light at least ten votes — and could be light as many as twenty three — depending on the dynamic on the House floor.

The problem is that some yes votes could get changed to no as the loss becomes apparent — why take a beating for a tough vote when the thing is going down?

Members of Congress will not take a beating, just for the sake of taking a beating. They will switch votes, and that is how you get to the fifty to fifty-five House Dems voting no.

The smart play for the Speaker is to don the robes of Mother Protector — I will save my House Members from Walking the Plank — we are waiting for the Senate to vote first. That way her House Members are protected against the bill dying in the Senate, without having taken a tough vote.

As one Senate Dem lobbyist told me yesterday, “Reid can get on the bill, he just can’t get off.” Translating from Washington-speak: Senator Reid can get past the filibuster of the motion to proceed, he just cannot end the filibuster against the bill itself. It is like Senator Reid’s own version of Hotel California hell — he can check in but he can never leave.

This is why the smart play for the Speaker and the White House is to punt. And Harry Reid’s offense takes the field.

Reid then takes the blame if he can’t get into the end zone. The Speaker merely points out the obvious: I was acting in the best political interest of my members. Why should we take tough votes on Medicare cuts, guns, immigration, abortion, taxes, spending, mandates (government control) and watch the Senate fail? (Again.)

But the continued forever quest for the holy-health care grail is making her look like Captain Ahab and the search for the Great White Whale — which in the end he found — it killed him, his ship and all but one of his crew.

Read More →

While the nation is going through the worst recession in modern history, our dollar is deflating because of government debt and we are electronically printing a trillion dollars; unemployment is at 10.2%, let’s tax the American people $752 billion (three quarters of a trillion dollars) and create a new entitlement and spend $1.8 trillion on something less than one in five Americans think is their top concern: health care. Three-quarters of likely voters believe the plan will force employers to give up providing insurance, shredding the “if you like it you can keep it promise.”

All while the American public overwhelmingly oppose the plan, and for triple political pain points, we can have the biggest votes on abortion, immigration, taxes, guns, the public option, Medicare cuts, massive spending and government control all rolled up in one vote, days after special elections that saw Independent voters run like scaled cats, screaming from the Democrats.

And at the same time as the President’s approval rating among likely voters glides ever downward..

Genius, isn’t it? And rational too.

From the NY Post’s “Prescriptions for Disaster” — when CBO scores the first ten years of spending, then we see the true cost of the House and Senate ObamaCare bills:

“Each bill is routinely “scored” for its 10-year costs from 2010-19. Yet this includes several years when the spending wouldn’t yet have kicked in. According to the Congressional Budget Office, fully 99.9 percent of the Pelosi bill’s costs would hit from 2013 onward. Similarly, 98.3 percent of Reid’s spending would come after 2014.

“The CBO reports that, in their true first 10 years, the House bill would cost $1.8 trillion, and the Senate bill would cost $1.7 trillion. Pelosi would raise Americans’ taxes by $1.1 trillion over that period, while Reid would hike them by $1 trillion.

And the House bill would siphon about $800 billion from Medicare to spend it elsewhere, while the Senate bill would suck out about $900 billion.”

The impact on our national debt:

“And if we discount the bills’ claims to divert hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare (which is already on the edge of insolvency), the CBO says the House bill would raise our national debt by about $650 billion in its real first decade, while the Senate bill would up it by $740 billion.

So, the bills would either sock older Americans by taking huge sums of money from Medicare — or hit future generations with huge tax hikes to cover the shortfall.”

There was a point in the last comprehensive health care reform debate (The Great Hillarycare War) when the House Ways and Means Committee passed out its health care reform bill despite what was an obvious revolt in the country.

It was irrational political behavior. For about five minutes, the opponents of Hillarycare were stunned.

And then the opposition decided to pull out all the stops.

That moment in The Great Obamacare War arrived yesterday, when the Speaker of the House stood firm on the public option, essentially telling the White House to go pound sand.

In effect, Speaker Pelosi just called in an air-strike on her own position.

This is not going to be pretty.

It will likely cost her the Speakership. After the 2010 elections.

If the President of her own party cannot convince her to stand down, no one can, and so now, she has essentially subjected her own members to unrestricted (obviously, non-violent) political warfare by those who oppose the public plan option.

The Pelosi-Waxman Alliance on Cap and Trade and Health Care is politically killing the Democrats in the House, and by sticking with the Public Option, Speaker Pelosi is insuring the House bill will never pass the Senate, and the Senate will see Speaker Pelosi’s position as a reason why they should just let the bill die in the Senate. I mean, with the Public Option, its not going to pass the Senate anyway.

The President’s most trusted advisor, David Axelrod told Politico:

“I think it’s fairly obvious that we’re not in the second inning. We’re not in the fourth inning. We’re in the eighth or ninth inning here, and so there’s not a lot of time to waste.”

That is about as good as it gets in terms of any admission from the White House that their signature initiative is in trouble (to continue the baseball analogy, the White House is behind) and the game is winding down.

A mid-August poll by Rasmussen of likely voters put President Obama’s support for a health reform bill at 34% without the public option:

“Just 34% of voters nationwide support the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats if the so-called “public option” is removed. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 57% oppose the plan if it doesn’t include a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.”

CBS News today had more bad health care polling news for the President:

Read More →

Reconciliation strategy for health care reform faces opposition from key Democratic Senators.

The great New York Times health care legislative strategy takes a lethal blow — again.

As Bloomberg reports:

Resorting to a budget procedure called reconciliation would infuriate Republicans and force Democrats to settle for more limited changes, said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington.

“Both procedurally and politically, this may be a no- win,” Duffy said.

Read More →

The intolerance of the left wing of the Democratic Party’s members of Congress for those who do not agree with them on health care reform was on display again, in public. Many of the old bull Democratic House Chairmen are hard core leftists, like the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee’s Health Subcommittee, Pete Stark (D-CA).

Yesterday, Stark pounded his fellow Democratic colleagues on health care reform. In a media conference call sponsored by Campaign for America’s Future, Congressman Stark called Blue Dogs “brain dead,” and went on to say:

“They’re just looking to raise money from insurance companies and promote a right-wing agenda that is not really very useful in this whole process.”

(Subcommittee Chairman Stark has called Health Savings Accounts the weapons of mass destruction of health care and he is a strong supporter of a single payer Canadian style health care system.)

But his attack on the Blue Dogs really signals his general level of frustration and his contempt for his colleagues. (You have to be really over to the left if you think the Blue Dogs are “right-wing.”)

It also means that Stark has all but written off their support for his health care bill — and is yet another indication that the left-wing of the Democratic party is isolated and beside themselves over the attacks on their plan, and its lack of support among their Democratic colleagues.

According to the White House, the video shot in 2003 that you are about to watch gives a “very false impression.”

It sure is easy to get this “very false impression” when you take the President at his word.

Or when President Obama over-ruled his Chief of Staff to support MoveOn.org’s push for a public plan option in the House and Senate health reform bills, and when his campaign organization and the DNC ran television ads against his own Democratic Congressmen to push them into supporting his plan.