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We started the week pointing to the House where many think the health care plan will live or die. Michael Barone in WSJ looks at Pelosi’s prospects.
… “If there is a path to 216 votes, I am confident the Speaker will find it,” writes Bush White House legislative strategy analyst Keith Hennessey on his blog. “She has a remarkable ability to bend her colleagues to her will.” True, but perhaps that ability has led Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill to embark on what will be remembered as a mission impossible.
Mrs. Pelosi, whom I have known for almost 30 years, may turn out to be even shrewder than I think. But she may be facing a moment as flummoxing as the one when Democratic Speaker Thomas Foley lost the vote on the rule to consider the crime and gun control bill in August 1994, or when Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert saw the Mark Foley scandal explode on the last day of the session in September 2006. Both were moments when highly competent and dedicated House speakers saw their majorities shattered beyond repair.
That moment, if it comes, will occur some time between now and the Easter recess. The Democrats’ struggle to get 216 votes is high stakes poker.
Jennifer Rubin has an optimistic post that even the senior Dems don’t want to pass Obamacare.
Even among high-ranking and dependable veteran House Democrats, enthusiasm for ObamaCare is underwhelming. The Hill reports:
A handful of House committee chairmen are either undecided about or plan to reject the healthcare reform bill that is expected to be voted on as early as next week….
Needless to say, if committee chairmen are underwhelmed with the president’s arguments, it may be hard to corral the rank and file. Jake Tapper and Hotline are keeping tabs, and so far, there are a lot of noes and undecideds. …The issue has been and remains whether moderate Democrats can be persuaded to vote for something their constituents hate and that, if they vote for it, will quite possibly end their careers. Stay tuned.
Jennifer Rubin also comments on the state of liberalism, and the kamikaze president.
…Then there is Obama (”it’s the rise in his disapproval ratings from the mid-20s in early March 2009 to the mid-40s now that ought to be troubling for Democratic strategists”) and all those disaffected independents who have gone “from virtually mirroring the sentiments of Democrats during the last two election cycles to now more closely resembling the views of Republicans.” …
…Obama has already hinted that a single term might be good enough for him. But in his hubris (hubris is like this, of course) he has neglected to recognize that his own political nosedive has real-world consequences both for his agenda (no one is taking his political advice all that seriously) and for his party. That may all become clear after November. As he said, that’s what elections are for.
In Forbes, Paul Johnson says that confidence in leadership has been damaged by the recession. Perhaps we should say that the recession has merely exposed the erosion of morals and principles that has been underway.
The world is groaning beneath a mountain of debt, but that’s not the real problem. History shows repeatedly that debt can quickly be paid off once confidence is restored and men and women set to work with a will. But for that to happen we must have trust in those who lead us.
Trust is missing. We do not trust–and with good reason–either our elected leaders or the corporate elite who constitute the top echelons of society. Seldom in modern history has the lack of trust, now verging on contempt, been so deep, universal and comprehensive. …
Andy McCarthy blogs in the Corner about the Gitmo lawyers and various aspects of the circulating arguments.
You can tell that the lawyers who’ve come to the aid of DOJ’s al-Qaeda lawyers don’t have a coherent case. Every time they open their mouths, they embarrass themselves.
First there was the comparison of lawyers who took up the enemy’s cause to John Adams. As Cesar Conda aptly put it earlier today, that comparison is ludicrous. The United States was not at war at the time of the Boston massacre, the British soldiers Adams agreed to represent were not uninformed terrorists, and those soldiers were defendants in a criminal trial. No one is claiming that defendants in a criminal trial are not entitled to counsel or that those who defend them are not performing a constitutionally valuable function.
But the al-Qaeda terrorists are at war with the United States, and they do not have a right to counsel to challenge their status as detainees. …
We have more thoughts from Jennifer Rubin, this time on the president’s lack of decorum during the State of the Union address.
Following the flap over Obama’s State of the Union attack on the Supreme Court’s decision striking down a portion of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, I wrote that it would be a good idea for the justices to skip the event in the future, since it has become a partisan affair that needlessly embroils them in political matters. I am delighted to see that I am on the same wavelength as the chief justice:
Chief Justice John Roberts told students at the University of Alabama Tuesday that President Obama’s State of the Union address, in which he singled out a recent Supreme Court decision on campaign finance law for criticism, was “very troubling” and said the annual event has “degenerated into a political pep rally,” the A.P. reports.
Taking a question from a law school student, Roberts said anyone is welcome to criticize the court. “I have no problems with that,” he said. “On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum. The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court – according the requirements of protocol – has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling. . . I’m not sure why we’re there,” he said.
… At least one thing is clear: this supposedly post-partisan president, who ran for office decrying old-style politics, has hyper-charged with partisanship nearly everything with which he comes in contact — the census, the Court, and the Justice Department, for starters. It’s good to see that not everyone is playing along. And it’s better still to see Chief Justice Roberts defend the dignity and apolitical nature of the Court. Obama may lose his props, but we should all benefit from the reminder that the justices are not in the business of cheerleading the president nor duty bound to perform the role of mute extras in his political drama.
The Obami had to get in the last word. Jennifer Rubin follows up on her last post.
Jan Crawford (h/t Glenn Reynolds), among the best of the mainstream media Supreme Court reporters, socks it to the White House for its juvenile insistence on getting the last word on its running spat with the Court. After Chief Justice John Roberts made the fine suggestion that the Court should abstain from the State of the Union, Robert Gibbs seemed to make Roberts’ point for him by replaying the president’s slap at the Court. (”What is troubling is that this decision opened the floodgates for corporations and special interests to pour money into elections – drowning out the voices of average Americans.”)…
…This is par for the course at this White House. It’s the perpetual rat-tat-tat, the quintessential campaign quick-response mode. There is no respect for the Chief Justice or the Court as an institution, nor for the point the Chief Justice was making: that it’s unseemly for the Court to appear and to get dragged into partisan brawls. In their partisan vitriol, the Obami, of course, proved the Chief Justice’s case. But then, self-awareness was never the White House’s strong suit.
In Contentions, David Hazony discusses the building going on in Jerusalem.
…One of the worst things about the Oslo Accords was the logic that said, “Let’s take care of the easy things first, and wait on the hard issues until later.” And so, while the Palestinians were allowed to create a heavily armed, ideologically belligerent, terror-supporting government in the territories Israel vacated, Israel gained nothing in terms of security, while the “hard issues” like Jerusalem and the repatriation of millions of Palestinians remained up in the air, not as questions to be resolved, but as threats hanging over Israelis’ heads: You can give us these, and face demographic and symbolic decimation; or you can refuse, and face a renewal of violence. When it became clear to Arafat that Israel had no intention of giving in on these core issues, all the “trust” that had been built was suddenly meaningless. He launched the second intifada, and the rest is too well known.
In making the move on Jerusalem, the Israeli government is trying to avoid the ambiguities that were the undoing of Oslo. Anyone hoping for a successful negotiation leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they are saying, had better forget about the division of Jerusalem. Sometimes, it’s the timing that drives the point home.
Jennifer Rubin points out that once again, the Obami have made poor choices in foreign relations, and further alienated a friend.
Joe Biden’s Israel trip has turned into a semi-fiasco, as David has noted. He was a poor substitute, the Israelis thought, for Obama. Then he condemned the Israelis’ decision to build 1,600 homes in their nation’s capital…
And notice the language Biden employed: “condemn.” A Capitol Hill Republican leadership adviser sends this keen observation:
What kind of language is this? Isn’t “condemn” reserved for things like beating dissidents, or even terror attacks? Whatever you think of the decision, the Obama administration couldn’t have said they felt it undermined the peace process, were “very disappointed,” saw it as “a step backward” or something like that?…
In the National Review, Stephen Spruiell discusses Gore’s political entrepreneurship. As we read yesterday, some people get rich by playing the political system rather than producing an item or service that improves people’s lives.
…Only a small part of Gore’s investment portfolio is tied to cap-and-trade. Most of the companies in which he invests would benefit from the other parts of the Democrats’ energy bill — the parts that would be much easier for Congress to pass. Congress has been subsidizing green programs for decades, and that support increased dramatically with the 2005 energy bill. But the Democrats want to pump it up still more, even though the consensus for dramatic action on climate change is buckling like a shoddy roof in a blizzard of scientific scandals. The U.S. government, facing record-setting deficits and debt, cannot afford new subsidies. Yet with “green jobs” as their rallying cry, Gore and other advocates for more green-tech largesse will push to pick the taxpayers’ pockets — lining their own all the while. …