It does not feel like it, but we are winning the war against ObamaCare.

You may feel like the political system is broken and the Democrats are not listening to the voters. You feel that way because it is true, the Democrats are not listening. But that does not mean the bill will not die — because it turns out that the two Independent Senators are listening.

Clearly, the Democratic Senate leadership and the White House put so much pressure on the so-called moderate Senators to win this one vote to proceed to the bill, they created a political mirage that the bill’s chances are strong. But they are not. The bill is very brittle, and when it implodes, it will shatter.

As the bill stands right now, the Democrats cannot pass it. They cannot get to 60 votes on the vote to end the filibuster of the bill.

If they try to take the public option out, Senator Sanders and others (Burris, Brown and Franken) are threatening to vote against ending the filibuster. If they keep the public option in, then Senator Lieberman has threatened to vote against ending the filibuster. Either way — public option in or out — the bill dies. And Senator Sanders is not going to agree to any co-oped-trigger-opt-out compromise on the public option.

Is it any surprise that the two Independent Senators have put the Senate in this position? They are listening to the public, and are playing a role that no single Democratic Senator has the courage to play — you know, listen to your voters.

Turns out the moderates like Senators Lincoln, Landrieu and Nelson are now viewed by their voters as servants of Senator Reid and the White House. They destroyed all their work to try and get their voters to see them as something other than liberal Democrats who will just spend and tax and spend. This was the highest price Senator Reid paid to win the vote to proceed to the bill: he has forced the so-called moderate Senators look like lap-dogs.

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Michael E. Hammond is one of three mentors I have been lucky enough to work for during my career. When I worked for him, he was the General Counsel of the U.S. Senate Steering Committee. He has run for Congress twice in New Hampshire and is now the General Counsel of Gun Owners for America. He is one of the two smartest political strategists I know. He is brilliant, a genius (literally, scored perfect on his SAT.) And the only thing I know about his work in the Army is he cannot talk about it.

REDSTATE WEB EXCLUSIVE

November 19, 2009
MEMORANDUM
FROM: Michael Hammond
RE: The Reid Bill: The Mandates, Public Option,
Regulation, Rationing, and Taxes

EDITORS NOTE

Harry Reid’s objective has been to secret the provisions of the most important piece of legislation in our lifetimes until he could cram it down Americans’ throats because there was insufficient time to analyze and mobilize against it. To some extent, he has succeeded. I have done what I could, given the need to disseminate this at least a day before the Senate moved to cloture on the motion to proceed. I have therefore focused on the mandates, the public option, regulation, rationing, and taxes.

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Sen. Lieberman is setting steel rebar and hardened concrete around his threat to filibuster the public option.

From Politico:

“It’s classic politics of our time that if you look at the campaign last year, presidential, you can’t find a mention of public option,” Lieberman said. “It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform — insurance market reforms, cover people, cover people who are not covered.”

“It suddenly becomes a litmus test. I thought Democrats were against litmus tests.”

The Lieberman filibuster bunker has hardened, and Senator Reid can’t breech it.

And you know what that means, right? Lets all say it together, Senator Reid has to throw the public option left wingers like Senators Franken, Brown, Burris and Rockefeller over the side, who are pounding their chest and the table about the absolute need for the public option.

These public-option-in-the-sky Senators will not like being tossed over the side.

The question is, as Senator Reid throws them overboard, will they plead for a fig-leaf public option deal? Essentially, will they ask to only be thrown mostly overboard (for those Monty Python er, Princess Bride fans, it’s like being mostly dead) or will they grab Senator Reid and take him with him as they go, just over the principle of the public option, and because they don’t like being thrown overboard?

There is going to be pushing and shoving on the deck of the USS Public Option, and I’ll be reporting the splashes, as they happen. (Grab the popcorn.)

For those attempting to figure out what is in the Senate ObamaCare bill, you are in the company of 99 U.S. Senators who have not seen the bill. At least that is what today’s New York Times is reporting:

“frustration has been growing among some lawmakers over the delay, especially as they are asked repeated questions about a bill they have not yet seen.

“I don’t think the bill text is being shown to anybody,” Mr. [Senator] Nelson said last week.”

According to CNN: “In fact, no one has seen the Senate bill.”

They a have a phrase out West for this — all hat, no cattle.

I call it a vapor bill — all hype, no bill.

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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.

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Like robots programed to march until they find a cliff and can march no longer, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi have been forced into the most contorted public position on any legislation — perhaps ever.

Senator Durbin (D-IL), the U.S. Senate Majority Whip said yesterday that the left forced the Democrat’s hand, and we’ll “see where we come out.” (H/T Huffington Post.) Sen. Durbin did not say: we have the votes, we will win, but he said, we’ll see — read: we do not have the votes and don’t know if we will get the votes because we have not written the bill yet, nor have we scored it.

If either the Speaker or the Senate Majority Leader had the votes, they would be voting on the bill now.

Here is what Pelosi’s public-facing contortion looks like:

a) We must have a public option;

b) we will have a public option; and,

c) the royal we, have the votes for a public option.

But the reality for Speaker Pelosi, who tried the group-peer-pressure-routine on non-compliant House members on Friday in an emergency all-Dem House caucus meeting, is actually inverted:

a) the royal we, do not have the votes for a public option; and, therefore,

b) we may not have a public option; and,

c) the left will be disappointed but the votes are not there so we will just keep our base happy and tell them we tried.

This reality is too real, too hard, too unthinkable. But the unthinkable is being thunk (ok, so it’s a fun word): the auto-insistence that “we have the votes” masks a reality too difficult to thunk — so let’s all in the Leadership not think about it and insist that the night is day. Much better, don’t you think?

For the U.S. Majority Leader Harry Reid, his contortion looks like this, as described by the invaluable-bio-intel-collection-system known as Milbank (who writes for WaPo):

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Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is funny, in his rendition of Majority Leader Reid and his quest to put $250 billion in ObamaCare off-budget, adding it to the deficit. It really is worth the read, here are his first paragraphs:

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future — period,” President Obama told Congress in a health-care address last month.

Well, that depends on what the meaning of “plan” is….So Democrats hatched a novel scheme: They would pass the legislation separately, so the $250 billion cost wouldn’t be part of the main reform “plan,” thereby allowing the president to claim that that bill wouldn’t increase the deficit.

Or this: “Finally we’re coming to the first vote on health-care reform, and what do the Democrats propose to do?” Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) asked at the microphones. “They propose to raise the national debt by . . . a quarter of a trillion dollars, plus $50 billion interest.”

There is plenty of good stuff in the piece, especially the quote by Senator Reid who essentially said — I did it because the White House told me to do it (he lost the cloture vote on the motion to proceed 47 to 53, Reid needs 60 votes to shut down a filibuster.)

OK, I cannot resist to quote Milbank’s Senator Stabenow stuff:

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James Pethokoukis (Reuters) cites two examples of why America is well down the road of a banana republic economy. Our record debt levels and deficits, combined the fiscal fantasy land the White House and Congress work and live in are writ large in both examples.

First, the White House announces a $250 payment to every senior for inflation that didn’t exist. “In effect, a COLA was paid on inflation that no longer existed,” notes Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute.

Second, the White House in its desperate attempts to get its health reform passed, has tasked the all-too-willing Majority Leader Reid to walk the plank by convincing him to push a $247 billion portion of health reform as an off-budget item, in a separate bill, to be on the Senate floor this week before moving to the merged ObamaCare bill. Even the Washington Post editorial board said “Mr. Reid proposes not to pay for any of it, not even $11 billion, but simply to write a $247 billion IOU.”

Pethokoukis correctly notes the considerable spin associated with JPMorgan Chase economist Jim Glassman’s attempt to convince the world that the falling dollar should rightly be interpreted as a sign of “new economic optimism” because dollar flight means the world economy is getting better and the world is pulling its money out of a safe investment. Really?

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How sustainable a political position does this sound like: You can’t see the Senate ObamaCare legislative language and we will not tell you how much it costs.

Here is how the San Francisco Examiner put it in their editorial:

When then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promised not to sign major legislation until it had been posted on the Internet for public reading at least five days, trusting voters took him at his word.

Now they know better. Not only is the actual language of what is likely to become the main legislative vehicle for Obama’s signature health care reform not available on the Internet, it hasn’t been given to members of the key Senate committees or the Congressional Budget Office.

Welcome to the Imperial Senate whose leaders view the public with contempt and the elitist attitude that you should not see the legislative language because you cannot understand it. You should not know how Medicare is being cut, or how you are going to taxed, or how the bill change every health plan in the nation.

We know, and we don’t want you to know — is the Democrats position in the Senate. They are shredding that trust, they are stomping it into the ground and burning it in public.

What are the Democrats hiding in that legislative language? What is in it they do not want the public to see? If the health care debate has taught the American public anything, then its the devil is in the details. But the Senate Democratic leadership says: you don’t get to see the details. We, instead have this new thing called the Vapor Bill: don’t read it (we won’t let you) just support it.

Perhaps this is why political analyst Charlie Cook recently said about the Independent voters: “they hate Congress something awful.” If you don’t believe Charlie Cook, then maybe you will believe this nine-month tracking chart by Gallup.

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