Dems Will Abuse Budget Reconciliation to Pass Socialistic Obamacare

PUBLIC OPTION MAY ALSO BE CRAMMED INTO PACKAGE

News Summary by Harry Hunter

(March 2, 2010) — On March 1, CNN White House Correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported that on Wednesday Barack Obama will announce a plan to force passage of the socialistic makeover of healthcare known as Obamacare, despite massive opposition from voters.   The political maneuver Obama is expected to use is the budget reconciliation process.

“Multiple Democratic sources told CNN that the emerging consensus plan is for the House of Representatives to pass the Senate bill and send it to Obama. A package of changes that mirror the president’s plan would then be passed through both chambers under reconciliation rules, which require only 51 votes in the Senate…Republicans have angrily criticized the Democrats’ potential use of reconciliation, arguing the maneuver was never intended to be used for major policy overhauls along the lines of the health care bill.”

On March 1, Jordan Fabian, writing for The Hill, also reported that Harry Reid’s Number Two, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), is openly supporting a petition to use the budget reconciliation process to pass the “public option” for health insurance.  The petition is sponsored by the socialist-minded Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC).  It is precisely this public option that the Communist Party USA has always insisted must be included in Obamacare.  Why?  Because the CPUSA knows that the public option is the key to creating the universal single-payer plan that is the ultimate goal of the progressives/socialists/communists.

Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), one of the authors of the Congressional rule that permits an expedited process in reconciling House and Senate budgetary differences, deplores the misuse of that process to ram through complicated healthcare legislation.  At his website Byrd spelled out his objections to such abuse:

Using reconciliation to ram through complicated, far-reaching legislation is an abuse of the budget process.  The writers of the Budget Act, and I am one, never intended for its [sic] reconciliation’s expedited procedures to be used this way.  These procedures were narrowly tailored for deficit reduction.  They were never intended to be used to pass tax cuts, or to create new Federal regimes.

The Senate has a unique institutional role.  It is the one place in all of government where the rights of the numerical minority are protected.  As long as the Senate preserves the right to debate and the right to amend we hold true to our role as the Framers envisioned.

With critical matters such as a massive revamping of our health care system which will impact the lives of every citizen of our great land, the Senate has a duty to debate and amend and explain in the full light of day. . . . Ramrodding and railroading have no place when it comes to such matters as our people’s healthcare.  The President [Barack Obama] came to the White House promising a bipartisan government . . . .

Obama promised bipartisan government—so chalk up another Big Lie for our putative president, the man who was born with foreign allegiance but went ahead and submitted a Candidate’s Statement in Arizona claiming “I am a natural born citizen of the United States.”

It looks like crunch-time is rapidly approaching, and the outcome of the November elections may largely depend on what happens next with so-called healthcare reform.  If Obamacare does indeed get unethically shoved onto Obama’s desk, with or without the public option, Republicans intend to make it a major issue in the fall campaigns.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who chairs the Senate Republican Conference, says that Obama’s vision of healthcare will be the defining issue in the midterm elections and that Republicans will campaign for repealing Obamacare.  Apparently Alexander assumes that Obamacare cannot be stopped.  Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House GOP whip, predicts that if Democrats go ahead and use the reconciliation stratagem to pass Obamacare, Republicans will win a majority of seats in November.

But any Republican comeback in November could come too late to prevent the destruction of one of the best healthcare systems on earth by the devotees of “progressive” change.  Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) may be able to wrap the phony “budget reconciliation” package so tightly in procedural duct tape that it would take a three-fourths vote to repeal it.  I suspect that is the plan which Senior Advisor David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have devised with Obama, Reid, and Nancy Pelosi in their Chicago White House.