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Democrats’ House-Senate Public Option Impasse Could Kill Healthcare Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook September 30, 2009 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It's too soon to tell but September 29, 2009, just may be the day that healthcare reform died.
On a bi-partisan basis the Senate Finance Committee rejected Tuesday two amendments, one by West Virginia Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, and a more modest proposal by Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, to add the so-called "public option" to the healthcare reform legislation currently being written.
Congressional cynics are already describing the votes as "fig leaves," intended to give vulnerable Democrats a "No" vote on the unpopular public option they can point to during their re-election campaigns. And they further predict that, regardless of whatever the Finance Committee produces, the legislation the Senate will finally vote on will either include some type of public option or will lay the groundwork for one in the future.
Taking the members of the committee at their word, or at least at their votes, means the public campaign against public option has had the desired effect—as least as far as the Senate is concerned—setting up a direct conflict with the House of Representatives.
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Why Are Dead Conservatives Fair Game But Dead Liberals Canonized?
Tweet Share on Facebook September 29, 2009 Comment (14)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The recent death of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, hit the nation hard. "The last lion of the Senate," as more than one approving memorial essay described him was, in the secular sense, canonized for the many good works he accomplished during his lifetime. It was, in a collective sense, considered bad taste to dwell upon his more public failings—which I will not recap in this space—as anything more than a part of the overall narrative of his life.
As a matter of decorum, it is more than appropriate to consider the balance of a public figure's life in determining their place in history. Very few people are all good or all bad; their lives are the sum of their failings as well as their accomplishments and it is a mistake, in my judgment, to dwell too much on either.
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Obama's Olympic Sales Pitch Oils the Daley Political Machine
Tweet Share on Facebook September 28, 2009 Comment (8)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
A quick review of the headlines across the Internet reminds us that the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place. The New York Times: "Iran Conducts New Test of Mid-Range Missiles." The Associated Press: "Venezuela Exploring Uranium Deposits with Russia." Reuters: "China to Display Upgraded Missiles in Oct. 1 Parade." The Financial Times: "India Raises Nuclear Stakes."
The news at home is hardly more reassuring. Reports of increased unemployment, especially among young people, tightened belts in the private and public sectors and racially charged beatings of students by students at America's public schools abound. It is clearly an unstable time, with lots of balls in the air.
And what is our president doing? Is he heading back to the United Nations to rally the civilized world in opposition to the Iranian missile and nuclear development program? Is he laying down markers emphasizing the Monroe Doctrine in an effort to keep Russian adventurism in South America in check? Is he taking to the Internet to address teen-on-teen race violence?
No to all of the above. The latest White House initiative has President and Mrs. Obama heading to Copenhagen, Denmark to pitch the International Olympic Committee on the merits of awarding the 2016 Summer Olympic Games to the city of Chicago.
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Democrats’s Heavy-Handed Healthcare Policies Are Backfiring
Tweet Share on Facebook September 25, 2009 Comment (24)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Ever since President Barack Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress about healthcare reform, his administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have been trying to refocus the debate. They want to move attention off their plan for reform and put it back on the insurance companies, which their pollsters tell them are about as popular with the American people as, well, Congress.
It's an interesting strategy—and one that might have worked if the Democrats were not so heavy handed.
Early this week, acting at the request of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services imposed a "gag rule" on the nation's health insurers to block them from telling seniors how Obama's proposed reforms might affect their healthcare and their coverage.
Unfortunately this latest gag rule fits in all too easily alongside the Democrats' other efforts to muzzle the opposition in the healthcare debate. Telling the insurance companies they can't talk to their customers is just like telling members of Congress they can't mail out the chart explaining how the new healthcare system would work to their constituents. Or trying to control access to town hall meetings on healthcare by requiring folks to show picture ids or letting Obamacare supporters fill the room an hour before everyone else is allowed in.
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Democrats Gag the Health Insurance Industry Over Obamacare
Tweet Share on Facebook September 24, 2009 Comment (28)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Lest there be any doubt, congressional supporters of healthcare reform have joined the White House in playing "hard ball" against its opponents. Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and is currently preoccupied with writing a healthcare bill of his own, recently asked the U.S. government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to investigate a mailer sent by the Humana healthcare company to senior citizens that it insures.
Baucus's complaint was that the mailer, which warned that efforts under way by Democrats to change healthcare in America could result in cuts to their benefits, constituted a disingenuous effort to frighten seniors. And CMS, as Roll Call reported Wednesday, was more than happy to oblige, launching an investigation at the "direction" of Jonathan Blum, a former Baucus Senate aide whom President Obama recently appointed to be acting director of CMS' Center for Drug and Health Plan Choices.
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Democrats Want to Keep the People in the Dark on Healthcare Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook September 24, 2009 Comment (36)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The ongoing public debate over healthcare reform is actually an exercise in self-government. Given the importance of the issue to each and every American it is not surprising to see Middle America insert itself into the debate in an informed if not always thoughtful manner.
Congressional supporters of Obamacare probably expected an easy public relations hit when they scheduled their healthcare forums during the August recess. They expected, no doubt, to interface with constituents, explain the bill, explain why their constituents needed to support it and gain some favorable coverage in the newspapers back home.
What they found was something quite different. Unlike many in Congress, the folks who turned out for the these events had actually read the bill—in this case H.R. 3200, the healthcare reform package pushed forward by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her leadership team. And, having read the bill, the critics of Obamacare were able to slice through the arguments in favor of it like a chain saw slicing through a barrel of fish.
Democrats in the United States Senate, however, are apparently not as naïve as their colleagues on the other side of the Capitol. They are pushing ahead with reform legislation fully intent on keeping it away from the prying eyes of the American people, if that's what it takes.
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When Petty Tyranny Threatens Everyone’s Liberty
Tweet Share on Facebook September 22, 2009 Comment (20)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Sometimes a small person possessed of a little bit of authority misuses it and gives everyone concerned a big black eye.
Several weeks ago, in an exchange posted on You Tube, a police officer working for the Fairfax County, Va., public schools threatened to arrest a person holding a sign expressing a sentiment with which the officer apparently did not agree. According to witnesses, when the demonstrator challenged the officer's command by saying "This used to be America," the officer replied, "It ain't no more, okay?"
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The Case for ACORN as a Criminal Enterprise
Tweet Share on Facebook September 21, 2009 Comment (45)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It now looks very much like there was a lot more truth to the criticisms about ACORN—the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now—than its leadership, its allies on Capitol Hill and its supporters in the media were willing to acknowledge.
The ongoing investigation of ACORN conducted by two activist-journalists working undercover—and brought to the public's attention by BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart and Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck—showed employees of ACORN caught on tape suggesting various ways to commit fraud and evade taxes.
The journalists, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, posed as a prostitute and her pimp asking ACORN for help in obtaining a mortgage so they could purchase a building they could use in their sex business, which included a number of under-age girls brought to the United States from overseas as sex workers.
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Would Obama Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Mean Free Healthcare?
Tweet Share on Facebook September 18, 2009 Comment (61)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Of all the hot-button issues surrounding President Obama and the Democrats' effort to change healthcare, the idea of including illegal immigrants in the coverage may be the hottest.
It's an issue that moves voters, including independents, and not, as some of the president's supporters have taken to suggesting, because of some sort of inherent or even overt racism. Americans object to illegal immigrants receiving services from the government because, in their taxpaying minds, people who are here illegally are getting a free ride that everyone else has to work harder and pay more in taxes to provide.
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Honoring a Revolutionary Document on Constitution Day
Tweet Share on Facebook September 17, 2009 Comment (20)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
More than 200 years ago a group of men produced a document that provided for ordered liberty while protecting individual freedom. That document turned the traditional underpinnings of governments, like "divine right of Kings," on their heads by declaring that each and every human being was in fact "King" over his own life.
The United States Constitution was and is unique in all of recorded history. It establishes as the basis of our government that ultimate power does not rest with a sovereign anointed by God or with an aristocracy or even with a single individual, popularly selected. No, the U.S. Constitution establishes that the home of the ultimate political power is, in fact, the hands and hearts of the people.
