Bart Stupak caves on abortion - Healthcare passes

The debate is over and the healthcare bill has passed the House by a vote of 219 to 212. Pro-life turncoat Bart Stupak announced late Sunday that he had reached an agreement with the President that an Executive Order would be issued upon passage of the Bill that would uphold the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of Federal funds for abortion. Stupak is either a fool or he was merely holding out for his share of the free-flowing money the House leadership used to purchase the votes of so many of his colleagues. Truthfully, I think his support was needed to provide a margin of comfort so Nancy Pelosi and the President leaned hard enough to make him fold like a cheap suitcase. I’m sure he waited too long to get one of the sweetheart deals his other friends received so in the end, all Mr. Stupak will get is an Executive Order from the President so that he can claim he stood fast on his principals.

First of all, considering the track record this President has at keeping his word, I doubt the Executive Order that Stupak will receive contains little more than a confirmation of the language that is already in the bill; language that is woefully inadequate to accomplish what Stupak claimed was essential to gain his vote. Why am I so cynical? The President has far more pro-choice Democrats to placate than the block of so-called pro-life Democrats that Bart Stupak had spoken for. The bill contains language that would allow someone purchasing insurance through the exchange to write a separate check for abortion coverage in order to claim that no Federal funds were used. Asking people to write a separate check for abortion coverage when purchasing insurance through the exchange means very little when the policy itself is subsidized with Federal money. This is a neat little accounting trick that amounts to little more than shifting money from one pocket to the other.

An iron clad guarantee would be the elimination of abortion coverage in the insurance available through the exchange, allowing insurers to offer a separate rider that people could purchase individually and totally outside of the exchange if they so desired. But that really isn’t the issue; now is it. The Hyde amendment already allows the use of Federal funds for abortion in the case of rape or incest but that does not go far enough for Progressive Democrats. Abortion may be a medical procedure but is it healthcare? For abortion to be considered healthcare one would have to place unwanted pregnancy in the same league with disease or illness instead of calling what it is….the natural and expected result of unprotected sex. One would think that abortion wouldn’t be an issue after the advent of AIDS or the less catastrophic but equally chronic plethora of sexually transmitted diseases but apparently, even the threat of disease cannot quell the fever of human desire.

I find it interesting that the pro-choice advocates that have, for years, rallied around the battle cry of “Leave my body alone” are now signing up in droves to support a bill that will give the government an incredible amount of control over those same bodies. Pelosi already said that this more about diet than diabetes indicating that our pro-choice friends may have retained control over their wombs but through this bill, have surrendered freedom of choice in nearly everything else that makes them human.

Progressives operate under the firm belief that there needs to be controlling power at the Federal level because the general population is incapable of making rational and informed decisions for themselves. The exchange was not a compromise to cure a healthcare crisis; it is phase one in the creation of a single payer national healthcare system that will make all of your healthcare choices for you; eventually using monetary penalties to force behavioral changes to reduce government healthcare costs. Even that will not be enough and as the deficit and debt increase because of this malignant entitlement program, the actual rationing of care is as inevitable as the collapse of the private insurance system that is already written into the bill.

The provisions in this bill that mandate changes to the level of coverage that must be offered by approved plans coupled with the proposed caps on premium increases can only have one consequence. Those provisions are intentionally designed to drive private insurance out of business because there is no way they can compete with the subsidized plans offered through the exchange. As the availability of private insurance becomes scarce, the Federal government will “have to” come up with a public option to shore up the exchange with full knowledge that the destruction of private insurance is imminent. When the last private insurer is driven into extinction that is when the public option will morph, out of necessity, into the single payer system Progressives wanted from the start.

No? Well, an employer that currently pays more than $10,000 per year per employee for private healthcare insurance will find some curious things. If even one of his employees seeks a “better deal” through the exchange, the employer will be fined approximately $2,000 for EACH of his employees. If he provides no insurance at all he will pay a fine of $3,000 per employee and be assessed an additional payroll tax for healthcare. As it turns out, the penalties for not providing healthcare insurance are less than the insurance itself. Maybe that’s the $3,000 reduction in employer costs the President said your boss would see if this bill passes? Almost, but then there is the loss of the Bush tax cuts in 2011.

The Executive Order that Stupak will attempt to use to placate his constituents is not a law so it can be rescinded by a future President with the stroke of a pen and I predict we won’t have to wait that long. If this bill becomes law, Obama will need those pro-choice Democrats to continue his agenda and I fully expect that Stupak’s “piece of paper” is one of the bargaining chips that will be auctioned off to obtain future votes for card check, cap and trade or immigration reform.

The American people have been riveted on the healthcare debate and are solidly opposed to this monstrosity. They are watching the debates and saw Bart Stupak not only as one member of Congress that actually stood for principal but as their last hope to defeat this bill. Defeat would have allowed us do something for healthcare that didn’t involve expanding the power of government to that of the level of a totalitarian dictatorship but that hope was stolen from the American people by Stupak today. The Executive Order that Stupak will wave at his constituents to gain their forgiveness for voting for this bill will not shield him from the fallout (or the rotten tomatoes). Let’s face it….if he had said he was opposed to the bill over money or the expansion of government and changed his mind later, he might have been forgiven. Since he made himself the poster boy for Congressional principals, the surrender of his convictions will be used by those that run against him as a clear display of his lack of character and pro-life organizations began that assault the moment the vote was concluded.

The healthcare debate is far from over and even though the Senate has promised to use reconciliation to pass the bill, there are points of order that will be raised by the Republicans for every component of the reconciliation package that is not a budget issue. After all, reconciliation is a budget procedure and anything that is not related to budget, will most likely be stripped from the reconciliation package if the Senate Parliamentarian agrees that it violates the rules of reconciliation. If anything in the reconciliation package is changed, it will have to go back to the house for a new vote; a vote that will take place after these poor Democrats have gone home for the Easter break, faced their constituents and tried to explain what they have already done. I seriously doubt Mr. Stupak’s piece of paper will make a damned bit of difference to any of them.

The Democrats have ignored the American people and that has enraged more of us than a sequestered Congress could possibly imagine. Pelosi and Reid forced this through on strict timelines to avoid the same harassing town halls Congressional members were subject to last summer. The leadership tried to convince their members that the opposition to the bill reflected by the polls is that people want more, not less and that since this bill will eventually achieve that, they will be vindicated. Well, the leadership has misread the people and this vote will go down in history as a political suicide pact. Too bad Nancy Pelosi represents a district that is even further to the left than Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or she would be packing her office this November too. The only solace I have is that it is virtually guaranteed that by the time January of 2011 rolls around, she will no longer be Speaker of the House.

Paul

Legislation Without a Vote - A New Low in Congressional History

It looks like we can add Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) to the list of people that are showing signs of mental duress in Washington. First there was her odd story during the Healthcare summit of call she received from some phantom constituent. According to Ms. Slaughter, this person had to resort to wearing her dead sister’s dentures because she had no health insurance and could not afford her own. About the only thing missing from that exchange was the image of her grasping at the air trying to catch the imaginary butterflies circling her head. Apparently Louise’s condition has worsened and she has slipped beyond eccentricity and is now living in her own little world; a world where the Congress has a whole new set of imaginary rules they can use to pass healthcare reform so her friend can stop wearing someone else’s teeth.

The Senate Parliamentarian has already ruled that a Bill that has not been signed into law cannot be subject to reconciliation and that places a difficult burden on House Democrats. They must accept the Senate Bill as written and pass it without modification so that the President can sign it before any reconciliation measure is possible to work out the differences between the House and the Senate versions. Of course the Senate crafted their own bill because there was no possible way the House bill could have passed the Senate. There is in fact, no reason to believe that the Senate will yield on anything the House wants once this thing has actually been signed into law. Herein lays the quandary. Certain House Democrats will not vote for the bill unless they have concrete assurances that their issues will be acted on in reconciliation and the Senate says they can offer no such assurances on a bill that has not been made law yet. Catch 22.

Now in another leap into the bizarre, Slaughter has suggested her own idea to move the Healthcare Bill forward; an idea that seems to appeal to her fellow dementia sufferer, Nancy Pelosi. Her thoughts are that since the House passed a bill and the Senate passed a bill, we’ve both passed a bill already. Let’s skip the vote and send this to the President since we both passed a bill! Well, the only problem with that idea is that they both passed different bills. Even the President’s odd-ball compromise presented just prior to the Healthcare summit was only a list of un-scored ideas that would modify the Senate bill and if any of those changes were incorporated into the Senate bill then, in fact, the Senate bill really hasn’t passed either….has it?

All jokes aside, this is a critically serious issue. To use the “Slaughter” plan, Congress would have to abandon every known rule of the legislative process and not only ignore the public rejection of this bill but circumvent the justifiable opposition posed by other members of Congress as well. The reason this bill has not passed on its own merit is that there is a bi-partisan rejection of it on a number of critical issues. To use Slaughter’s idea to move it out of the house would not only damage the efficacy of the Democratic Party as they face a difficult election year but would also raise serious questions about the legitimacy of the Federal government as legislation ceases to be legislation and wants becomes laws through the dictates of a minority group of radical ideologues.

The loss of legitimacy is a serious charge, but have any of the processes used in conjunction with this Congress and this President resembled anything we have ever seen in the past? Agency heads threatening Congress to pass legislation “or else”; threats of using reconciliation to pass bills that have not even been signed into law; the use of Presidential executive orders to seize an additional thirteen million acres of land to deny access to oil, gas and coal reserves and now, the Progressive wing of a single Party bypassing all of Congress to achieve a bullet point on their agenda?

True Democracies are never overthrown by violent means; they are consumed by malevolent forces from within. The apathy of an appeased electorate opens the door for the systematic encroachment on personal liberty under the guise of “providing for the good of the people”. The government can only provide a benefit if we agree to surrender certain rights in that area. What is the Healthcare bill really about? Well, Nancy Pelosi unwittingly admitted that the other day. In a speech she was giving about the “wondrous” gift they are about to give the American people she said that for the first time we will be able to address the health of the nation. Pelosi continued: this is more about “diet than diabetes”. Really? And how does the bill accomplish that lofty goal unless there will eventually be mandates controlling your diet?

Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory Czar, would love nothing better that to see people “nudged” into a meat free diet. He’s even said in papers written earlier in his career that animals should be represented by attorneys. Well, with health mandates we can just “regulate” you away from those barbarous acts of eating poor defenseless animals and dispense with the need for animal lawyers altogether. Don’t forget the nuts and bolts of this plan are not described in the bill itself. They will be crafted later by the massive new agency and controlling board it will create; a controlling board appointed by Barack Obama and guided by the wisdom of Cass Sunstein.

Some may yell out “That is absurd! The United States government doesn’t have the right to tell me what I can eat!” Well, that’s true (for now) but they didn’t have the right to tell people they can’t smoke either. What they have seized the right to do, now that the Constitution is nothing but an obstacle to skirt, is tax something out of existence. One of the first acts of the Obama administration was to increase the sin tax on cigarettes more than 250%. Of course anti-smoking activists applauded the move with little consideration of how heavily the application of “sin” taxes depends on who is identifying the “sin”. Now that the likely targets for the new healthcare sin taxes will be hamburgers, fries and a cold soda, how do the supporters of cigarette taxes feel about delegating that amount of control to the government now? A little cheated maybe?

But wait, there’s more! Red meat has been accused of causing heart problems and cancers, so kiss your delicious steaks goodbye. Sugar? I’m sorry…diabetes. Salt? Well, New York is already working to ban that from restaurants because of the link to high blood pressure so that’s probably out too. Butter; cream; candy and that dreaded of all criminals…pizza! Life is about to become very bland indeed.

If you’re willing to foot the added expense of the “chubby-foods” sin tax you can still eat like its 1999 but the part we don’t know is if the new healthcare guidelines will impose insurance premium surcharges for people that don’t fit the healthcare board’s idea of physically fit. What’s your BMI? How much do you exercise? Are you engaged in risky behavior like skiing or skydiving? You know anything that can harm you is bad and therefore in dire need of behavioral modification.

That is just a dream though. This is the United States of America; the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave! The Federal government just doesn’t have that kind of power under the Constitution. But then again, what does the Constitution mean anymore if laws can be passed by ideological zealots that can get away with only pretending there was a legitimate vote? Sounds like Election Day in the old Soviet Union doesn’t it? One candidate scoring a landslide victory… that’s a perfect example of Progressive Democracy for you!

God help us now!

Paul