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John Steele Gordon explains one of the reasons the health care bill was so poorly written. We also learn one of the reasons compromise is so difficult.
Obamacare, enacted more than three years ago, has been unraveling for over a year. And there’s a good reason for that: it was never intended to become law at all.
Ordinarily one house of Congress passes a bill and the other house then substantially amends that bill or writes its own from scratch. No one worries too much about the actual language in these bills because they eventually go to a conference committee made up of both senators and representatives. There, the differences are ironed out and legislative draftsmen put the conference bill into final shape. That’s when they worry about the exact language, cross the T’s, dot the I’s, and reconcile conflicting provisions. After both houses pass this final, cleaned up legislation, it goes to the president for signing and becomes law.
But that process was aborted in this case. The Senate passed its version, full of sloppy language, impossible mandates, and contradictory provisions, on Christmas Eve 2009. It could do so because the Democrats at that point had a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority.
But then, the people of Massachusetts stunned the political world by electing a Republican to Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat in January 2010. Bye-bye filibuster-proof majority. If the House didn’t pass the exact same bill the Senate had passed, the two bills would have to be reconciled and the final bill sent back to the Senate, where the Republicans now could—and certainly would—filibuster it.
There were only two choices: have the House—where the majority has total control—pass the Senate bill with all its sloppiness, or cut the Republicans in on the deal sufficiently to pick up a couple of Senate Republicans. This being Obama’s Washington, of course, they opted to pass a crudely drafted, legislative horror show into law.
Now these political chickens are coming home to roost. …
… But why is there not a normal, let’s-get-the-country’s-business-done political atmosphere in Washington these days? Could it have something to do with a president who says, in a scheduled press conference, such things as:
“Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned — kids staying on their parents’ plan; seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs; I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance; people with preexisting conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.”
Republicans, of course, don’t oppose any of those provisions, except, perhaps, for 26-year-old “kids” on their parents’ health insurance. It is pure, unadulterated, unadorned, bald-faced political slander by the president of the United States against the party that controls one house of Congress. It is also political stupidity of a very high order.
Barack Obama is, by far, the most viciously partisan president in American history. Other presidents have been partisan, often deeply so, but were careful to take the high road so as to keep open lines of communication with the other party, without which governance cannot be successful in a democracy. Not Barack Obama. His incompetence in everything political except winning elections is now costing him (and, inevitably, us) big time.
History will not treat this man kindly.
John Hayward says a new “consult with business leaders clause” has been found in the Constitution.
President Obama’s bizarre press conference on Friday produced a number of memorably loopy moments, but none surpassed this alleged Constitutional scholar’s discovery of the “consultation with business leaders” clause in the Constitution, which gives Presidents limitless power to break the law, provided some unspecified number of business leaders approves.
This is the same press conference where Obama compared the controversial universal domestic surveillance programs of the National Security Agency with his wife checking up on him to make sure he did the dishes, yes. This is the press conference where he invented a new “core al-Qaeda” subdivision, never mentioned once during his endless “al-Qaeda is on the run” football spiking over the death of Osama bin Laden during the 2012 campaign. Detroit is dead after struggling with a fifty-year case of terminal liberalism, and al-Qaeda has America on the run, but rest assured, bin Laden sleeps with the dishes.
Nevertheless, the stuff about the Business Leader Clause was more significant. It’s a real window into the way this lawless President views his limitless executive power, and the servile relationship of the American people to their wise ruling class. The old chestnut about conservatism versus liberalism asks if we are a people with a government, or a government with a people. But to Barack Obama, America is an almighty White House with a vestigial legislature, hot-wired to a few big cities, isolated in a dark sea of ignorant flyover-country child-citizens who must occasionally be told fanciful things to keep them under control.
This is what the President said, on the subject of his illegal modification of the Affordable Care Act to roll the employer mandate back by a year:
With respect to health care, I didn’t simply choose to delay this on my own. This was in consultation with businesses all across the country, many of whom are supportive of the Affordable Care Act, but — and who — many of whom, by the way, are already providing health insurance to their employees but were concerned about the operational details of changing their HR operations if they’ve got a lot of employees, which could be costly for them, and them suggesting that there may be easier ways to do this. …
National Review piece on more lawless behavior from the president.
America has a two-party system. But it’s not Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the ruling class — Republicans and Democrats — against everyone else. Consider how President Obama just gave Congress its very own Obamacare waiver.
Obamacare includes a provision that should cost each member of Congress and each staffer $5,000 to $11,000 per year. Needless to say, the ruling class was not pleased.
Congress wasn’t about to try to exempt itself from this provision explicitly, though. If John Q. Congressman voted to give himself an Obamacare waiver that his constituents don’t get, he wouldn’t be John Q. Congressman much longer. What’s an aristocrat to do?
On July 30, I predicted that, even though he had no authority to do so, President Obama would waive that provision at taxpayers’ expense. On August 1, he ignobly obliged the aristocracy by decreeing we peasants give each member and staffer $5,000 or $11,000, depending on whether they want self-only or family coverage. It’s good to be king.
The president’s supporters, like courtesans of old, are trying to quell a peasant uprising by denying there were any special favors. The denials ring hollow. …
John Hinderaker wonders if insulting Putin is “smart” diplomacy.
Remember the good old days when the Obama administration promised “smart diplomacy?” Hillary Clinton mocked the Bush administration for not cozying up sufficiently to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and presented the Russians with a “reset” button to demonstrate that from now on, things would be better. Right.
Now the administration is feuding with Putin over Edward Snowden. It is a bad sort of feud, because the Russians hold all the cards, in the person of Snowden. Whatever Snowden knows they can easily learn, and at this point there is nothing we can do about it. So in his press conference today, Obama lashed out against Putin:
“I don’t have a bad personal relationship with Putin. When we have conversations, they’re candid, they’re blunt; oftentimes, they’re constructive. I know the press likes to focus on body language and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.”
Maybe directing gratuitous insults toward rival world leaders is a good strategy, when you are dealing from a position of weakness. Maybe, but I doubt it. Although I can see how it could be tempting. But we certainly have come a long way from the early days of the “Hope and Change” administration.
Prosecutorial overreach in Tennessee becomes columnist overreach by Nicholas Kristoff.
IF you want to understand all that is wrong with America’s criminal justice system, take a look at the nightmare experienced by Edward Young.
Young, now 43, was convicted of several burglaries as a young man but then resolved that he would turn his life around. Released from prison in 1996, he married, worked six days a week, and raised four children in Hixson, Tenn.
Then a neighbor died, and his widow, Neva Mumpower, asked Young to help sell her husband’s belongings. He later found, mixed in among them, seven shotgun shells, and he put them aside so that his children wouldn’t find them.
“He was trying to help me out,” Mumpower told me. “My husband was a pack rat, and I was trying to clear things out.”
Then Young became a suspect in burglaries at storage facilities and vehicles in the area, and the police searched his home and found the forgotten shotgun shells as well as some stolen goods. The United States attorney in Chattanooga prosecuted Young under a federal law that bars ex-felons from possessing guns or ammunition. In this case, under the Armed Career Criminal Act, that meant a 15-year minimum sentence.
The United States attorney, William Killian, went after Young — even though none of Young’s past crimes involved a gun, even though Young had no shotgun or other weapon to go with the seven shells, and even though, by all accounts, he had no idea that he was violating the law when he helped Mrs. Mumpower sell her husband’s belongings. …