From the Hill:

“More than 40 lawmakers vowed to oppose the final healthcare bill if the House language on abortion is not removed.

Reps. Diana DeGette (Colo.) and Louise Slaughter (N.Y.) led the group of Democrats in writing to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatening to withhold support for a final conference report if it strictly prohibits federal funding for abortion services.

“We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law,” reads a draft of the letter. DeGette and Slaughter, who is the chairwoman of the powerful Rules Committee, also wrote President Barack Obama requesting a meeting on the issue next week.”

The pro-abortion Democrats may have two options: a) accept pro-life language prohibiting federal funding of abortions, or b) kill their own health bill.

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 →

In every election-changing close vote on legislation that passes in the U.S. House, there are two or three U.S. House Members who switch their vote at the last minute.

Usually, these are newbie House members, freshmen or sophomores who succumb to pressure from their leadership. They forget their own districts, and what they need to do to keep their jobs.

Thus, we are reminded of the case of Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA) who famously switched her vote to give then President Clinton his tax increase.

It was her vote that passed the bill.

The vote by Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA) was an expensive one: she lost the following year.

Here is how Wikepedia describes what happened:

“After defeating Republican Jon D. Fox in a close contest, she became a member of the 103rd Congress. However, she was not re-elected. Losing in 1994 to her 1992 opponent, she was one of 34 Democratic incumbents who were defeated in the Republican Revolution. Her defeat was blamed on her vote for President Bill Clinton’s controversial 1993 budget, for which she was the deciding vote. After the vote, Rep. Robert Walker (R-Pennsylvania) reportedly mocked her, jumping up and down and said “Goodbye, Marjorie” alluding to the fact that her deciding vote would cost her the seat.”

You can bet that any Democratic House member(s) who switches their vote to give Speaker Pelosi her health care victory will be targetted en masse, by the legions who are strongly opposed.

It will cost any last-minute-Democratic-House-vote-switching-member their seat. Of course, if the bill fails then there will be no Margolies-Mezvinsky Effect.

For those House Members who think they may collapse under leadership pressure, here is a tried and true method for avoiding that fate: hide. Vote and get off the House floor, turn off your cell phone and hide somewhere you can not be found. Not one of your usual haunts. And go alone, so you aren’t outed by your staff.

While Senator Reid admitted in a letter sent to every Republican Senator that his merged bill between the Senate Finance and Senate HELP Committee versions is a vapor bill and “does not exist,” the Speaker is forcing her House Members to walk the plank and vote.

Senator Reid says he is waiting for various scores to come back from the Congressional Budget Office, but you have to wonder why the Speaker is forcing her membership to walk the plank on a much more thermonuclear subject than cap-and-trade — the health bill, which is really the biggest vote of the year on spending, abortion, taxes, immigration, the deficit, and government control of the lives of Americans?

As the Speaker forces House Members to walk through that minefield, ABC NEWS is reporting no health care until next year:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has yet to release the bill he eventually plans to bring to the Senate floor. Reid is still waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to come up with an estimated cost of several possible variations of his bill before deciding which one to introduce in the Senate.

That cost estimate, Democrats tell ABC News, is not expected until next week.

Asked directly by ABC News, “Will you pass health care reform this year?” Reid pointedly did not answer “yes.”

Instead, he replied, “We are not going to be bound by any timetables,” adding, “We are going to do this as quickly as we can.”

Perhaps the ignorance of Senate procedure on the House side is playing to Speaker Pelosi’s advantage. Since Senator Reid rejected Sen. Snowe’s trigger in favor for a public option, it takes but one single Senator — either a Democratic or Independent Senator — to cause the entire bill to fail on either the cloture vote on the motion to proceed or on the cloture vote on the bill.

What if the House votes and the bill dies in the Senate? How will the vulnerable, behind in the polls Democrats in the House feel then?

Some are pointing to The Hill article today that cites liberals who have been repeating promises that Senator Reid has said Lieberman has made, not kill the bill.

On the other hand, Senator Lieberman’s spokesperson has been clear on this point, as The Hill article states:

“Lieberman’s spokesman said Monday that nothing has changed from last week, when the senator said he would support calling up the bill but would block a final vote.

“Sen. Lieberman has made it clear that he will vote for the motion to proceed to the healthcare bill but will oppose cloture on a final bill if it contains a public option because he believes that it would worsen our national debt problem,” said Lieberman aide Marshall Wittmann.”

Do House Members really want to put their faith in Senator Reid’s ability to deliver?

Or perhaps Senator Reid is going to disappoint the left by telling them he must drop the public option to pass the bill in the Senate?

The news keeps getting tougher for the House Leadership in their irrational quest to pass their ObamaCare bill.

First, the Associated Press is reporting the bill will cost $1.2 Trillion without the doctor fix of $250 billion.

The new total will be $1.45 trillion — because the House Leadership intends to create a “self-executing rule” that would pull the doctor fix apart from the House ObamaCare bill — in order to keep the cost at $1.2 Trillion, then fuse the doc fix back into the ObamaCare bill after it passes the House.

It is like a magic trick, presto — $250 billion in new spending just appears in the bill after it passes.

Meanwhile, the new $1.45 billion ought to send the Blue Dogs scampering from the bill.

Then, of course, the House is finally grappling with two thermonuclear issues: abortion and immigration.

But, as numerous news reports state, the Democratic Leaders still do not have the votes for the bill — rumors abound, the most credible put the House vote count at less than 200 for the bill.

The more fundamental question is, why is the U.S. House voting before the U.S. Senate? House leadership has already moved the vote from Thursday to Friday, and are now talking about the vote being moved to Saturday or Monday of Tuesday of next week. House leaders should just punt the vote until after the Senate, and save their members — and themselves — the pain of voting.

Especially when the Senate is now talking post-Thanksgiving for its floor vote?

Why is the Speaker forcing its members to walk the plank again, prior to the Senate vote, especially when it is likely that the bill will never get off the Senate floor?

Read More →

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):

Read More →

The abortion issue, you may recall, was described by George Stephanopoulos as “the gravest threat” to the health reform bill. The largest concentration of Democratic NO votes on health care reform are because of the abortion issue.

So, naturally, in an article about Speak Pelosi’s efforts to rally votes for ObamaCare, the New York Times actually talked about other issues besides the public option as critical to passage of the bill. Here is what the New York Times said about abortion yesterday:

“House Democratic leaders are still trying to figure out exactly how to limit the use of federal money for abortions.”

In other words, they know that their current language will not satisfy, among others, the Catholic Church, which issued a change it or else threat. But the Democratic Leadership has not figured out what to do. The demands of the pro-life Democrats have been really straight-forward, give us a vote on our amendments to ban federally funded abortions and allow medical providers the ability to refuse to perform or help perform abortions.

What this really means is that the Speaker does not want to compromise and allow pro-life amendments, unless she has absolutely no other choice in the matter.

On that issue, the NYT reports “Ms. Pelosi said she had not decided whether lawmakers would be allowed to offer amendments on the House floor.”

The Speaker will not allow the pro-life Democrats to offer and get votes on their amendments. She has not said yes, meaning she is now at no.

Further, the need to get CBO to score the bill before it gets to the House floor was also acknowledged as another complication, as the NYT reported: “In addition, before taking their bill to the House floor, Democrats need to get a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.” This is no small matter, since scoring takes about two week, once CBO has the language in hand.

There are other issues that are causing intra-Dem heartburn, and one of them is the Democratic Governors who are very concerned about the unfunded mandates the federal government is imposing on State governments. A Medicaid concerns letter signed by more than a dozen (14) Democratic Senators, sent late last week to Senators Reid, Baucus and Dodd, can be found here.

It is useful to note that the Speaker does not have the votes for ObamaCare now, nor will she likely anytime soon. Other vote draining issues on the Democratic side are the cuts to Medicare Advantage, the public option, the spending and tax levels of the bill and whether to give illegal immigrants benefits under the bill.

CongressDaily is reporting that the House Leadership thinks they have 218 votes for ObamaCare. Speaker Pelosi herself said she “definitely” has 218 votes.

Call the vote on ObamaCare NOW Mrs. Speaker, if you have the votes, call the vote.

But you will not call the vote, because you don’t have the votes. And you will not call the vote anytime soon.

Here is one report from one source, who is as credible and well informed as they get, who wrote this after meeting with a Dem Chief of Staff (CoS):

Rep. Bart Stupak, leader of the pro-life Dems, has at least 50 votes in opposition to the bill. The CoS [Chief of Staff] also said there are lots of pro-choice Dems who don’t believe federal funding should be used for abortion. Ratchet the number up some more.

Then there are the Blue Dogs who don’t like it. And the CoS does not think they will roll. The BDs [Blue Dogs] took a licking at home after the Cap-and-Trade vote and then again during the August recess. They do not desire to repeat that.

Then you have Dems with Dem Governors back home telling them they can’t afford what the feds are about to throw at them via Medicaid.

Then you have the Dems in districts with large senior populations who are not happy with the Medicare cutbacks being proposed.

And Pelosi thinks she can get 218 out of this? “Ha!” laughed the CoS.

Politico is reporting that the President will back a public option in his speech before the Joint Session of Congress tonight.

This means that the President will not get his public option through the Senate, nor will he likely have the votes in the House, since by including the public option, the political price for a yes vote became very high for moderate Democrats. Add into the mix the other issues like new taxes, new spending, increasing deficits, coverage for abortion (a WaPo op-ed states abortion could derail ObamaCare), cuts to Medicare and senior’s opposition, and you have a very expensive vote for the moderates.

TIME is reporting the following:

“House leaders have pulled back from their once-aggressive schedule. “I have no timetable” for passage of a bill, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters yesterday. While eschewing the idea that they would wait for the Senate to act, they are stuck waiting at least until Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus shows his hand.”

Given the House Leadership’s and the President’s refusal to budge on the public option, it makes the cost of a yes vote too high. There are not the votes in the U.S. House to pass ObamaCare, and if this is the big, re-activated, re-energized approach that President Obama will take on health care, good luck with that.

According to Politico:

Read More →

The politics of passing health care reform are exactly opposite in the Democratic controlled U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

1) In the House, Speaker Pelosi, staying true to her San Francisco Democratic roots will not pass health reform without a public option — and she has a recent letter signed by 83 of her Dem House colleagues from the Progressive Caucus, telling the President that a health bill “without a robust public option will not achieve the health reform this country so desperately needs. We cannot vote for anything less.”

2) In the Senate under normal Senate rules, a bill with a public option will not pass.

As it stands now it appears the White House is betting they can roll the Speaker, and the 83 Members of Congress who signed the letter cited above. When I say as it stands now, the repeated flips and flops by the White House and President Obama on this issue have kept both sides hoping they can cause another flip. And MoveOn has now targeted the White House with phone calls.

President Obama’s weapon of choice to convince the Members of Congress that it is OK to be rolled, and convince them they should act against their own political interest — is his own speech, his words — yet another health care speech, by him.

But the constant speechifying by the President on health care reform has not improved his approval rating slide, it keeps sliding. Zogby, in a poll of more than 4,500 likely voters, found President Obama’s approval rating at a record low of 42%.

Read More →

A few months ago, a Republican U.S. Senator told me that he pleaded with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to pressure the HELP Committee Democrats to let the Republicans negotiate and help shape the bill, since the Democrats were not listening or including the Republicans in any discussions. Senator Kennedy’s staff told the Republican Senator to take a hike. No one told Senator Kennedy’s staff otherwise. (Senator Dodd was torn between helping his dying friend and letting Kennedy’s legendary staff be his legendary staff.)

On the House side, Chairman Waxman gave the Blue Dogs on his own Committee, and Blue Dogs outside the Committee the closed mouth, no information treatment. Forget about influencing the bill, he did not tell them what was in it until it was too late. The Blue Dogs told Chairman Waxman what they wanted, he just ignored them.

All the while President Obama was publicly “reaching out” to Republicans — while his Leadership colleagues in Congress ignored Republicans, and ignored Democrats in their own party.

Thus was born ObamaCare, of a strategy to allow the far left (Speaker Pelosi and Chairman Waxman) to design the plan and ignore those who disagreed, while publicly and repeatedly the President said he wanted to work with Republicans.

Read More →

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 number of likely voters who approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President is at 45 percent. (Note: other pollsters poll “Adults” instead of likely voters. Polling adults inflates President Obama’s approval rating.)

The President’s continued pushing of a politically lethal health care plan is to blame. But the three horsemen of the Democratic Party’s Apocalypse: Speaker Pelosi, Chairman Waxman and President Obama keep on riding the Death Horse.

As the Wall Street Journal put it today: “‘What we’re seeing now, both in terms of numbers and the feel out there, this is how big waves feel early on,” said Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report.”

Read More →

The Washington Post is reporting that Senator Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, has been convinced by his August recess experience (like this one) to stand-down on broad spectrum health care reform. The Post also quotes Senator Snowe, one of the three Republicans that make up the Gang of Six negotiating health care reform with the Chairman Baucus, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, as saying the main take away from the August recess is that people like their health care the way it is now.

The effect of Grassley and Snowe backing off means Obamacare can never — not ever — get 60 votes in the Senate, because Senator Grassley’s and Senator Snowe’s agreement would have put enormous pressure on the moderate Democratic Senators to play ball on the Obama plan. And if you read between the lines of Senator Grassley’s quotes in the Post story, it is clear the American public do not believe the President’s campaign promise “if you like your plan you can keep it.”

Now, Senator Grassley is supporting, he says, a narrower measure. What narrower measure? Good question. I am sure that the Gang of Six, or however many are left, will let us know when they decide.

Yet another blow to Obamacare came from Charlie Cook. In what constitutes an emergency political message to the Democratic Congress, election analyst Charlie Cook sent out a special, unscheduled newsletter to his subscribers. According to Politico, Cook warned the political situation in August (read: Obamacare) “has slipped completely out of control.” Cook is so hyper-sensitive to criticizing his Democratic colleagues, he did not even use the words health care. Instead, he cited “August.”

Charlie Cook says in his emergency warning newsletter to the Democrats that his own estimates of a loss of 8 to 12 Dem House seats “are far too low.” Cook added, “We believe it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact that this mood will have on Members of Congress of both parties when they return to Washington in September, if it persists through the end of the Congressional recess.”

First, the moderate GOP Senators Grassley and Snowe back off big picture health care reform. Then, Cook warns the Dems that his estimates of them losing a dozen seats in the House next election are “far too low.” And President Obama’s approval ratings are at an all time low, and yet, President Obama still is out trying to drum up support for Obamacare. He keeps doing what is causing his polls to sink.

And is that Obamacare with or without a public plan? Who knows? A majority of the Ameircan public want Congress to do nothing on health care reform. Nothing, yet President Obama keeps pushing Obamacare.

It is beginning to look like this analysis, posted Sunday, was right on the money.

Read More →

SWAY is a fascinating book about irrational human behavior, hence its title: SWAY, The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman (2008, published by Broadway Books).

In particular, the lessons painted by the book are clearly applicable to the health care debate engulfing the United States, the Congress and the White House. Prior to making the intellectual lash ups between the lessons of SWAY and the health care debate, a look at the key tenets of the book is essential.

It is impossible to do the book justice in the few words below, or from the excerpts below, but here are six central tenets/causes of irrational human behavior that are documented in SWAY, which are among the base causes of irrational human behavior:

Read More →

…Then all of the political consequences that both he and Speaker Pelosi are now experiencing make sense. It explains the most inexplicable thing to me: why did the President over-rule his Chief of Staff on the question of siding with MoveOn.org early on in the health care debate over the public option? Because President Obama has always wanted a single payer system.

The media refuses to report this, but opposition to the public option is one of the hardest points of opposition within the Blue Dog revolt. Like making abortion a benefit paid for by taxpayer dollars, the public option is a binary thing — you are either at yes or no (zero or one) on the question.

Read More →

The American Medical Association, in comments in response to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee legislative options discussion draft, stated that they are opposed to a public plan option.

This puts the American Medical Association at odds with both President Obama and Speaker Pelosi, who has said she will not let a bill out of the U.S. House without a public plan option.

This news was reported in the New York Times here, and below are the most relevant excerpts:

“While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.” It is now reacting, for the first time, to specific legislative proposals being drafted by Congress.

“In the presidential campaign last year and in a letter to Congress last week, Mr. Obama called for a new “public health insurance option,” which he said would compete with private insurers and keep them honest.

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said Wednesday that she supported that goal. “A bill will not come out of the House without a public option,” she said Wednesday on MSNBC.

“But in comments submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, the American Medical Association said: “The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans.”

“If private insurers are pushed out of the market, the group said, “the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.”

Speaker Pelosi claims that the CIA lied to her about its handling of terrorist detainees held by the United States. She claims not to have been informed about the methods being used to get information from prisoners. Obviously, this is almost certainly false. Why would the CIA have informed other lawmakers about interrogation methods, but not Pelosi?

But even if we take her at her word, another problem arises. Pelosi does not dispute that she learned about waterboarding no later than early 2003, when her intelligence staff attended a CIA briefing where it was discussed. Since she learned about waterboarding no less than 6 years ago, she had ample opportunity to register objections without disclosing any secrets to the public. That’s because the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence - on which Pelosi served as the senior Democrat in 2002 - conducts closed hearings on sensitive topics, to hear testimony from intelligence community officials. Further, House rules specify a procedure by which Representatives can force a debate on sensitive intelligence matters in a closed session. The most recent such session was in 2008; if Pelosi was so concerned about ‘torture,’ why did she not attempt to force a closed session to discuss it? And why did she not raise it during closed hearings of the Intelligence Committee with CIA officials? (Check out the House rules governing the Intelligence Committee here, starting on page 14.)

Read More →