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Keeping up with the theme of last week’s first day of posting and Jonah Goldberg’s piece on healthcare schadenfreude, we open with a short from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit about healthcare sticker shock among congressional aides. Glenn calls it the “feel good story of the week.”
Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure.
“In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.”
Here’s the Politico piece Glenn linked to.
… Under the Affordable Care Act, and federal regulations, many congressional staffers — designated as “official” aides — were forced to move out of the old heavily subsidized Federal Employees Health Benefits program and into the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace exchange. Others designated as “unofficial” were allowed to stay in the FEHB program. Managers had to choose whether aides were “official” or “unofficial” by Oct. 31, and Ta said that wasn’t enough time to make an informed decision about who would benefit and who would lose out by going into the new system. …
PajamasMedia portrays president’s plunging poll problems. (6P’s!)
For the White House, November has been the cruelest month, with increasing worry among Democrats that a year from now could mean another midterm electoral disaster, similar to the results in 2010 when Republicans picked up over 60 House seats to gain control and netted six Senate seats as well.
Each day produces a new poll with terrible numbers for the president and his policies. The Obama approval level has dipped below 40% in several surveys in recent days, and yesterday hit an all-time low of 37% in a CBS poll — a survey that in the past has often been better than average for President Obama. Disapproval of the president in the CBS poll reached 57% — a record 20% negative gap. In one month, the president’s approval score has dropped by 9% in the CBS poll, a collapse mirrored in pretty much every survey where there is frequent polling. …
Mark Steyn writes on the lack of self restraint; connecting the dots from the “Knockout game” to Harry Reid’s nuke in the senate. First he starts with C. S. Lewis who happened to die 50 years ago too. So, actually, Steyn started with JFK and found his way to a government we should not respect.
… In his book The Abolition of Man, he writes of “men without chests” — the chest being “the indispensable liaison” between the head and the gut, between “cerebral man” and “visceral man.” In the chest beat what Lewis calls “the trained emotions.” Without them there is no honor or virtue, but only “intellect” and/or “appetite.”
Speaking of appetite, have you played the “Knockout” game yet? Groups of black youths roam the streets looking for a solitary pedestrian, preferably white (hence the alternate name “polar-bearing”) but Asian or Hispanic will do. The trick is to knock him to the ground with a single punch. There’s a virtually limitless supply of targets: In New York, a 78-year-old woman was selected, and went down nice and easy, as near-octogenarian biddies tend to when sucker-punched. But, when you’re really rockin’, you can not only floor the unsuspecting sucker but kill him: That’s what happened to 46-year-old Ralph Santiago of Hoboken, N.J., whose head was slammed into an iron fence, whereupon he slumped to the sidewalk with his neck broken. And anyway the one-punch rule is flexible: In upstate New York, a 13-year-old boy socked 51-year-old Michael Daniels but with insufficient juice to down him. So his buddy threw a bonus punch, and the guy died from cerebral bleeding. Widely available video exists of almost all Knockout incidents, since the really cool thing is to have your buddies film it and upload it to YouTube. And it’s so simple to do in an age when every moronic savage has his own “smart phone.” …
… As a “continuing body” the Senate’s procedures are supposed to remain in force unless a two-thirds supermajority votes to change them. In this case, a 52–48 all-Democrat majority voted to change the rules, and so the rules have been changed. After all, who’s gonna stop Harry Reid? The Senate pageboys? Legislative majorities are here today and gone tomorrow, but legislative mechanisms are supposed to be here today and here tomorrow and here next year. If a transient party majority can change the rules on a single, sudden, party-line vote, then there are no rules. The rules are simply what today’s rulers say they are. After all, banana republics and dictatorships pass their own rules, too — to deny opposition politicians access to airtime, or extend their terms by another two or three years, or whatever takes their fancy.
As noted last week, the president knows no restraints either. He has always indicated a certain impatience with the “checks and balances” — “I’m not going to wait for Congress” has long been a routine applause line on the Obama ’prompter. From unilaterally suspending the laws of others (such as immigration), he has advanced to unilaterally suspending his own. So, for passing political convenience, he issued his proclamation of temporary amnesty for the millions of health plans he himself rendered illegal. The law is applied according to whim, which means there is no law. Four years ago, polls showed no popular support for anything as transformative as Obamacare. But, through procedural flimflam, lameduck-session legerdemain, threats to “deem” it to have already passed, and votes for a law whose final version was not only unread by legislators but was literally unreadable (in the sense that it had not yet rolled off the photocopier), through all that and more, the Democrats rammed it down the throats of the American people anyway: Yes, we can! Brazen and unrestrained, Obama and Reid are also, in Lewis’s phrase, “men without chests.” Cleverness, unmoored from Lewis’s chestly virtue of honor, has reduced them to mere tricksters and deceivers. So the president lied about his law for four years, and now lies about his lies.
A government that lies to its own citizens should command no respect. To accord them any is to make oneself complicit in their lies, which is unbecoming to a free people. …
So what does a left/media type think of Harry Reid’s actions? Here’s Dana Milbank quoting Carl Levin.
… Sen. Carl Levin (Mich.), one of just three Democrats who opposed his colleagues’ naked power grab, read those words on the Senate floor Thursday after Reid invoked the nuclear option. The rumpled Levin is not known for his oratory. But he is retiring next year and free to speak his mind — and his words were potent.
“We need to change the rules, but to change it in the way we changed it today means there are no rules except as the majority wants them,” Levin said. “This precedent is going to be used, I fear, to change the rules on consideration of legislation, and down the road — we don’t know how far down the road; we never know that in a democracy — but, down the road, the hard-won protections and benefits for our people’s health and welfare will be lost.”
The word “historic” is often tossed around in Washington, but this change ends a tradition dating to the earliest days of the republic. …
… “If a Senate majority demonstrates it can make such a change once, there are no rules which binds a majority, and all future majorities will feel free to exercise the same power, not just on judges and executive appointments but on legislation,” Levin said Thursday. Quoting one of the Senate’s giants, Arthur Vandenberg, Levin said his fellow Democrats had sacrificed “vital principle for the sake of momentary convenience.”
If it was possible to make things even worse in Washington, Reid just did it.
John Fund on the significance of move in the senate. Reid’s hypocrisy is on display here.
… This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Senate’s changing from a body selected by state legislatures to one elected directly by popular vote. But that change came through passage of a constitutional amendment and its subsequent ratification by four-fifths of the states. Reid’s move abandoning the Senate’s longtime protection of the minority was done by the will of one man acting with a bare 52 to 48 majority of his colleagues. Three Democrats (Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Carl Levin of Michigan) opposed his power play because it will inflame partisan tensions in the body and limit the role George Washington said the Founders envisioned for the Senate: “We pour legislation into the Senatorial saucer to cool it” from the passions of the House. Many now fear the Senate will almost inevitably come to resemble the House rather than a consensus-driven body consistent with the design of the Founders.
Democrats claim their move was necessary because Republicans have recently blocked three nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and an executive-branch nominee, Representative Mel Watt (D., N.C.), who was nominated to be the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GOP claimed that adding three new judges to the influential D.C. Circuit — which hears most major regulatory cases — was a purely ideological move, since the workload of the court was provably so light. In 2006, when Democrats were in the Senate minority, they used that very argument to urge the late Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter not to confirm any additional Bush nominees to the D.C. Circuit — and none were confirmed.
It’s certainly true that many Republicans were once tempted to trigger the nuclear option. In 2005, GOP Majority Leader Bill Frist (R., Tenn.) proposed invoking it to clear a filibustered logjam of judicial nominees. But an eloquent critic of the practice stepped forward and convinced enough Republicans to back down and keep the filibuster. His name was Harry Reid, and he was then the minority leader. As he said on the Senate floor at the time: “For 200 years, we’ve had the right to extended debate. It’s not some ‘procedural gimmick.’ It’s within the vision of the Founding Fathers of our country. They established a government so that no one person — and no single party — could have total control.”
Reid used to boast about his role in “saving” the filibuster. In 2008, he claimed: “In all my years in government, that was the most important thing I ever worked on.” He swore that as long as he was leader he would never use the nuclear option, saying it would be a “black chapter in the history of the Senate.” …
More from Jonathan Tobin.
… There’s no denying that partisanship is nastier in Congress than it once was. But if President Obama and Reid think it can’t get worse, they’re kidding themselves. For all of the bitter combat that has been carried on in just the last year over the budget, ObamaCare, the shutdown, and the various administration scandals, the business of government has largely proceeded unhindered. Many nominations have been approved, bipartisan legislation passed, and the unanimous consent to keep the upper body functioning has almost always been there. But now that Reed has pushed the plunger on the so-called nuclear option, all bets are off. The 45 Senate Republicans may no longer have the power to block the president’s appointments on their own, but Senate procedures still give them plenty of latitude to put holds on legislation. Not only will Reed find it even harder to do his job now that he has broken faith with his opponents and sought to squelch dissent, he and the president may also discover that the benefits of their decision will not be as great as they think. …