Democrats defy Constitution on health care

Last week, the Senate parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, ruled that Democratic leaders couldn't amend the ObamaCare bill partway through the process with a reconciliation sidecar. The president would have to sign into law the wildly unpopular Senate bill before any changes could be made. This was a blow to the House where Democrats are divided against the Senate legislation for a number of reasons, including abortion and special deals like the Cornhusker Kickback. We predicted that the only route for success would be for Harry Reid to fire the parliamentarian. Instead Democrats have decided to just ignore the parliamentarian's ruling entirely.

[Congressional Democratic] Leaders appeared to be favoring a maneuver that would allow lawmakers to approve the reconciliation package without taking a separate vote on the politically dicey Senate bill. Under this scenario, the Senate bill would be deemed to have cleared the chamber once the House approved the package of fixes.

In other words, the House doesn't even have to vote on an actual bill. They can just approve a list of changes -- the reconciliation sidecar -- which will then amend a bill that, again, they haven't actually approved. It's called the Slaughter Solution (after Rep. Louise Slaughter) and the parliamentarian ruled it out. Another panel of experts would agree with Frumin: the Founding Fathers.

All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.

That's Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution. Under the Slaughter Solution, ObamaCare wouldn't originate in the House since the House won't have even voted on the actual legislation. Even then the bill still looks doomed to fail. With House Democrats lining up against the president on a variety of issues, Rep. James Clyburn admitted yesterday that ObamaCare still doesn't have the votes to pass. But if it does, Obama's signature piece of legislation will become law unconstitutionally and in defiance of Senate rules.

Democrats confirm: Health care summit is a fraud

The health care summit is still going on and it's relatively uneventful so far. But it looks like none of that will matter anyways. Democratic strategists have confirmed that the health care summit was a sham to make Republicans look bad.

"A Democratic official said the six-hour summit was expected to 'give a face to gridlock, in the form of House and Senate Republicans.'

Democrats plan to begin rhetorical, and perhaps legislative, steps toward the Democrats-only, or reconciliation, process early next week, the strategists said.

After the summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid planned to take the temperature of their caucuses.

'The point [of the summit] is to alter the political atmospherics, and it will take a day or two to sense if it succeeded,' the official said."

Obama is such a stubborn radical, he still plans to jam his bill through. Meanwhile unemployment has skyrocketed and the American people overwhelmingly oppose his health care remedies. Hopefully the bruising that the GOP gave Obama today will only hurt his plans even further. But this much is clear: Obama is hell-bent on passing a health care bill and doesn't care what it takes and who gets sacrificed in the process.

Chicago Politics in the Health Care Bill

Barack Obama's health care bill passed the second of four cloture votes in the Senate this morning and will likely pass entirely during an eleventh-hour vote on Christmas Eve. Polling universally shows that Americans don't support the government power grab. So how did Obama and company rack up the required 60 votes? They used the sort of corrupt pay-to-play politics usually restricted to smoke-wreathed Chicago backrooms, that's how. Here's a list of payoffs from the Washington Post:

"First there was the 'Louisiana Purchase,' $100 million in extra Medicaid money for the Bayou State, requested by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Then came the 'Cornhusker Kickback,' another $100 million in extra Medicaid money, this time for Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).

This was followed by word that Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) had written into the legislation $100 million meant for a medical center in his state. This one was quickly dubbed the 'U Con.'

...

Indeed, the proliferation of deals has outpaced the ability of Capitol Hill cynics to name them.

Gator Aid: Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) inserted a grandfather clause that would allow Floridians to preserve their pricey Medicare Advantage program.

Handout Montana: Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) secured Medicare coverage for anybody exposed to asbestos -- as long as they worked in a mine in Libby, Mont."

Earlier this week, Joe Lieberman revealed that Obama never pressured him to support the public option; instead the president and Rahm basically gave Lieberman whatever he wanted to obtain his support. It was also reported that Ben Nelson was meeting constantly with his friend Obama to hammer out a compromise on abortion. (The compromise ultimately had very little to do with abortion and everything to do with cold hard cash to Nelson's state in the form of Medicaid money.) In other words, the driving force behind these kickbacks was none other than Barack Obama -- which makes perfect sense given his background in Chicago politics.

Obama Maxes Out Our Credit Card

File this under galling hypocrisy. Barack Obama has spent our nation so far into debt, Congress is rushing to raise the national debt ceiling. Right now the government is legally barred from accruing a debt greater than $12 trillion. With his enormous spending spree underway, Obama is slated to exceed that debt. If Congress doesn't either cut spending or increase the debt ceiling by $1 trillion or so, the government could go broke and lose its triple-A credit status.

You didn't think the profligate Barack Obama was going to cut spending, did you?

But the president hasn't always been so reckless with the country's finances. Back in 2006, President Bush asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling, primarily to finance the continuing military escalation in Iraq. With righteous indignation, an outraged Senator Obama took to the floor. "Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren," he railed. "America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership." Although domestic spending increased between 2001 and 2008, Bush's government debt was spent primarily fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama is more than willing to mortgage America's future in order to bring one-sixth of the American economy under federal control with his health care bill, or to give the likes of the AARP and La Raza kickbacks with the stimulus. But accruing debt to fight for national security? That's just irresponsible.

Obama later voted "no" on the debt ceiling increase along with his fellow Democrats.

This is stunning hypocrisy, but it also has a large silver lining. Obama is trying to force feed his health care bill through the Senate in December, the same month in which the debt ceiling must be raised to prevent financial hell from breaking loose. A coalition of Republican and moderate Democrat senators, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, are drawing a line in the sand, demanding that Obama submit budget cuts before they'll vote to raise the debt ceiling. If more liberal Democrats protest this (which they likely will), there could be a contentious battle on the Senate floor which could drag on for days. This would take up a good deal of the precious time that Harry Reid needs to steer ObamaCare through before the Senate adjourns for Christmas break.

Will Obama's big spending come back to bite him this month? It seems almost too good to be true.