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Robert Samuelson comments on what to expect with the looming passage of the Obamacare abomination.
Barack Obama’s quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America’s long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He’s championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country’s long-term interests. “This isn’t about me,” he likes to say, “I have great health insurance.” But of course, it is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved “universal” health insurance. He’ll be disappointed.
Even if Congress passes legislation — a good bet — the finished product will fall far short of Obama’s extravagant promises. It will not cover everyone. It will not control costs. It will worsen the budget outlook. It will lead to higher taxes. It will disrupt how, or whether, companies provide insurance for their workers. As the real-life (as opposed to rhetorical) consequences unfold, they will rebut Obama’s claim that he has “solved” the health-care problem. His reputation will suffer. …
…Obama’s plan might add almost an additional $1 trillion in spending over a decade — and more later. Even if this is fully covered, as Obama contends, by higher taxes and cuts in Medicare reimbursements, this revenue could have been used to cut the existing deficits. But the odds are that the new spending isn’t fully covered, because Congress might reverse some Medicare reductions before they take effect. Projected savings seem “unrealistic,” says Foster. Similarly, the legislation creates a voluntary long-term care insurance program that’s supposedly paid by private premiums. Foster suspects it’s “unsustainable,” suggesting a need for big federal subsidies. …
In the Atlantic blogs, Megan McArdle posts on the Congressional kamikazes.
So there’s now about a 90% chance that the health care bill will pass.
At this point, the thing is more than a little inexplicable. Democrats are on a political suicide mission; I’m not a particularly accurate prognosticator, but I think this makes it very likely that in 2010 they will lost several seats in the Senate–enough to make it damn hard to pass any more of their signature legislation–and will lose the house outright. In the case of the House, you can attribute it to the fact that the leadership has safe seats. But three out of four of the Democrats on the podium today are in serious danger of losing their seats.
No bill this large has ever before passed on a straight party-line vote, or even anything close to a straight party-line vote. No bill this unpopular has ever before passed on a straight party-line vote. We’re in a new political world. I’m not sure I understand it. …
One Dem has had enough. Politico reports on an Alabama congressman who is switching to the GOP. His northern Alabama seat has not been held by a Republican since 1866. That was an 18. That’s right, not since Reconstruction.
Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith announced Tuesday that he’s switching parties – saying he can no longer align himself “with a party that continues to pursue legislation that is bad for our country, hurts our economy and drives us further and further into debt.”
“Unfortunately there are those in the Democratic Leadership that continue to push an agenda focused on massive new spending, tax increases, bailouts and a health care bill that is bad for our healthcare system,” Griffith said in a statement. “I have always considered myself to be an independent voice and I have tried to be that voice in Congress – but after watching this agenda firsthand I now believe that the differences in the two parties could not be more clear and that for me to be true to my core beliefs and values I must align myself with the Republican party and speak out clearly on these issues. …
In Politico, Carrie Budoff Brown and Patrick O’Connor look at what’s left to do to pass ObamaCare.
…But the real fight will occur in negotiations between House and Senate leaders over a final bill.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California can’t afford to lose any Democrats. And with Stupak threatening to vote against the Senate compromise, she’ll need to offset his vote with other Democrats who voted against it the first time. She might be able to pick up some moderate-to-conservative Democrats who favor the Senate approach, but many of these lawmakers will need to be OK with the final abortion restrictions.
On the other side, a bloc of abortion-rights backers, led by DeGette, has already promised to vote against any bill that includes Stupak’s amendment, which would prevent people who receive government subsidies from purchasing coverage for elective abortions through the exchange. DeGette believes many of the 41 Democrats who voted for Stupak and “yes” on the House health care bill are willing to work with party leaders to find a middle ground.
The opposing camps are similarly entrenched on the public option and the method for financing the health care expansion. The House would create a government-sponsored insurance plan, but the Senate bill is silent on this point. After several attempts at compromise, Reid nixed the public option altogether. …
Jennifer Rubin says Olympia Snowe may finally be coming to her senses.
Obama has finally managed to do it. He first lost David Brooks — and now Sen. Olympia Snowe. In her statement of opposition to ObamaCare, Snowe detailed some substantive concerns, but basically she got fed up with the bullying:
It defies logic that we are now expected to vote on the overall, final package before Christmas with no opportunity to amend it so we can adjourn for a three week recess even as the legislation will not fully go into effect until 2014, four years from now. … Ultimately, there is absolutely no reason to be hurtling headlong to a Christmas deadline on monumental legislation affecting every American, when it doesn’t even fully go into effect until 2014. When 51 percent of the American people in a recent survey have said they do not approve of what we are doing, they understand what Congress does not — and that is, that time is not our enemy, it is our friend.
Therefore, we must take a time out from this legislative game of “beat the clock,” reconvene in January – instead of taking a three week recess – and spend the time necessary to get this right. Legislation affecting more than 300 million Americans deserves better than midnight votes on a bill that cannot be further amended and that no one has had the opportunity to fully consider – and the Senate must step up to its responsibility as the world’s greatest deliberative body on behalf of the American people.
It’s significant that the not-very-conservative conservatives hovering around the middle of the political spectrum have thrown up their hands in collective disgust, recognizing that ObamaCare is not about reasoned policymaking but about brute political strength. Notice how popular — and broad-based — is the coalition of “no.” Recall that Olympia Snowe voted in favor of the stimulus plan, providing a bare fig leaf of bipartisanship to that embarrassing legislation. That she has reached her limit and can no longer justify even to her not-at-all-hardcore-conservative constituents voting for the latest junk-a-thon bill says something about how the political landscape has shifted. …
Jennifer Rubin also posts on Senator Mitch McConnell’s efforts to get Dems to look at the political precipice they were standing on.
On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, among the cagier and more effective Republicans, uttered a final thought in his fiery denunciation of the health-care bill: “All it takes is one. Just one. One can stop it — or every one will own it.” Every one of the Democrats who voted in lockstep for cloture after 1 a.m. now owns the health-care bill. Each of the senators up in 2010 becomes the decisive vote. And each of them up in 2012 as well. In each and every race, this vote will be one of the top, if not the top issue, and voters enraged by one or another of the bill’s provisions (e.g., abortion subsidies, the violation of Obama’s pledge not to tax families with income less than $250,000, the slashing of Medicare) will get to register their disapproval.
As McConnell pointed out dryly, “But make no mistake: if the people who wrote this bill were proud of it, they wouldn’t be forcing this vote in the dead of night. … The final product is a mess — and so is the process that’s brought us here to vote on a bill that the American people overwhelmingly oppose.” …
Peter Wehner posts on the political consequences to come from Obamacare.
Here are some thoughts on where things stand in the aftermath of the certain passage of the Senate health-care bill.
1. Few Democrats understand the depth and intensity of opposition that exists toward them and their agenda, especially regarding health care. Passage of this bill will only heighten the depth and intensity of the opposition. We’re seeing a political tsunami in the making, and passage of health-care legislation would only add to its size and force.
2. This health-care bill may well be historic, but not in the way the president thinks. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything quite like it: passage of a mammoth piece of legislation, hugely expensive and unpopular, on a strict party-line vote taken in a rush of panic because Democrats know that the more people see of ObamaCare, the less they like it.
3. The problem isn’t simply with how substantively awful the bill is but how deeply dishonest and (legally) corrupt the whole process has been. There’s already a powerful populist, anti-Washington sentiment out there, perhaps as strong as anything we’ve seen. This will add kerosene to that raging fire.
4. Democrats have sold this bill as a miracle-worker; when people see first-hand how pernicious health-care legislation will be, abstract concerns will become concrete. That will magnify the unhappiness of the polity. …
Rick Richman discusses Obama’s fall from grace.
In Monday’s Rasmussen presidential poll, only 26 percent of the nation’s voters strongly approve of Barack Obama’s performance as president, while 43 percent strongly disapprove — giving him a Presidential Approval Index rating, a sum calculated by subtracting the number of strong disapprovals from the number of strong approvals, of negative 17. His overall disapproval rating is 53 percent (it has been 50 percent or more for over a month). But it is the extraordinarily high proportion of those who strongly disapprove that bears noting.
In January, George W. Bush left office with a “Strongly Disapprove” rating of … 43 percent. It took Bush eight years to achieve that level of strong disapproval, despite how the mainstream media pummeled him for years. Obama has reached that level in 11 months, despite a media that for months could not use his name in a sentence without also adding “Lincoln” and “FDR.”
To appreciate the magnitude of Obama’s ratings fall, consider that after his first full day in office, his presidential index was positive 30. Today’s index of negative 17 reflects a swing of 47 points in less than a year.
A commenter at the Huffington Post today observes that Obama has “accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center.” The president has also unified the Republican party and created a tea-party movement that in some polls is more popular than both the Democratic and Republican parties. …
We have Thomas Sowell’s final installment of the five part series on the housing crisis.
Congressional support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went far beyond words. When the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight — the agency overseeing these government-sponsored enterprises — turned up irregularities in Fannie Mae’s accounting and in 2004 issued what Barron’s magazine called “a blistering 211-page report,” Republican Sen. Kit Bond called for an investigation of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, tried to have their budget slashed and sought to have the leadership of the regulatory agency removed. Democratic Congressman Barney Frank likewise declared: “It is clear that a leadership change at OFHEO is overdue.”
In short, Fannie Mae’s political support in Congress has been bipartisan. “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s employees and political action committees donated nearly $5 million to current members of Congress since 1989,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Sen. Bond received $95,000 and Sen. Christopher Dodd received $165,000. According to the Wall Street Journal:
The two companies employ armies of lobbyists and consultants and are major campaign donors. “There has been no more powerful organization in Washington than Fannie Mae,” said Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn. “They have been able to manipulate the regulatory and legislative process for years.” …
In the Corner, Samuel Gregg posts on how the Marxist liberation theology has hurt the Catholic church.
It went almost unnoticed, but on December 5, Benedict XVI articulated one of the most stinging rebukes of a particular theological school ever made by a pope. Addressing a visiting group of Brazilian bishops, Benedict followed some mild comments about Catholic education with some very sharp and deeply critical remarks about liberation theology and its effects upon the Catholic Church.
After stressing how certain liberation theologians drew heavily upon Marxist concepts, the pope described these ideas as “deceitful.” This is very strong language for a pope. But Benedict then underscored the damage that liberation theology did to the Catholic Church. “The more or less visible consequences,” he told the bishops, “of that approach — characterised by rebellion, division, dissent, offence and anarchy — still linger today, producing great suffering and a serious loss of vital energies in your diocesan communities.” …
…For a start, there’s little question that liberation theology was a disaster for Catholic evangelization. There’s a saying in Latin America that sums this up: “The Church opted for the poor, and the poor opted for the Pentecostals.” …