It is now a given that if he wins a Massachusetts Senate seat on Tuesday, Scott Brown will destroy the Democrats' plan to pass health care reform. But he will also destroy the Republicans' not-so-secret plan to pass health care reform.
In Washington, where everyone is desperate to know what's happening behind closed doors, all you have to do to keep something secret is do it out in the open, preferably on C-Span. Mitch McConnell did exactly that when he entered a unanimous consent agreement with Harry Reid about how to proceed on the health care bill. McConnell knew that agreement was going to make it impossible for Republicans to amend the bill and would put it on a fast track toward passage.
McConnell accepted an agreement brilliantly designed by Reid that required 60 votes to pass an amendment. McConnell did that without anyone noticing anything odd after a year of saturation coverage of the importance of 60 votes in the Senate. Everyone outside the Senate now thinks it takes 60 votes to do anything. Not amendments. Amendments pass by a simple majority, 51 votes. Amendments are usually debated for a couple of minutes or hours or days, then voted on. Once in a while, a 60-vote cloture motion is needed to end debate on an amendment. What McConnell agreed to was an implicit cloture motion in every vote on every amendment, thereby completely surrendering the minority's real power. In all my years in the Senate, I never saw a leader make such a mistake. If it was a mistake.
There are no real filibusters in the Senate anymore. The way you "filibuster" a bill that you want to kill is offer an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments that have to be debated and voted on. It's easy to come up with one amendment per page of legislation. That's why the Republicans offered hundreds of amendments during the Senate committees' debates on the bill. When the majority leader brings up a two thousand page bill, the minority would normally come up with at least five hundred amendments that could drag out the debate for several months. That's what the Republicans did in 1994 when they killed the Clinton health care reform bill on the Senate floor. No filibuster, no forcing the Democrats to clear 60-vote procedural hurdles, no forcing a reading to the bill, just an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments -- so reasonable that some of them passed with votes of 100 to 0. And the Democrats, seeing this could go on forever, surrendered. Fifty-seven Democrats were defeated by forty-three determined Republicans.
This time, Republicans tried to look obstructionist. To the media, the Tea Partiers, and Sarah Palin, it sure looked like Republicans were pulling out all the stops -- forcing a reading of the bill, forcing a frail elderly senator to vote in the middle of the night. But the Republicans only offered four substantive amendments along with five hopeless motions to send the bill back to the Finance Committee. One Republican amendment actually got 51 votes, but didn't pass because McConnell's 60-vote agreement with Reid sabotaged it. A Democratic amendment on re-importation of prescription drugs got more than 50 votes but did not pass. It would have shot a hole through Harry Reid's bill, as would other Democratic amendments that got more than 50 votes and failed. McConnell's unanimous consent agreement with Reid made Reid's bill impenetrable on the floor.
There are no columnists or pundits who understand Senate parliamentary procedure. There are actually very few senators who do. McConnell knows that. He knew everyone would fall for the silly stunts that looked obstructionist while he was surrendering all his power to Reid.
And now the strategy becomes clear: Repeal it! That is the Republican Party battle cry for the 2010 election. Repealing Obamacare is going to be the centerpiece of their campaign to take back the House and Senate. But how can you repeal it if they don't pass it. Hence, Mitch McConnell's enabling.
President Obama threatening to violate a campaign pledge by taxing workers' health care plans is one thing, but actually doing it is a dream come true for Republicans. They know the health care reform bill has a handful of taxes like that, none of which were mentioned by any Democrat in the last campaign. They can't wait to campaign to repeal those taxes. The internal Republican strategy debate now is should we repeal the whole bill or maybe leave some of the more popular sounding bits alone? But how can they run on any kind of repeal if Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts and steps into the Senate just in time to kill Obamacare?
If that happens, and the Democrats then scale back their dreams on cap and trade and other liberal ideas, then maybe moderate independents -- including some of Scott Brown's voters -- might think Mitch McConnell has all the Republicans he needs to keep the Democrats on the moderate course those voters prefer. So who is Mitch McConnell really rooting for in Massachusetts?
Just saw you give it to that Thiessert guy on Morning Joe. God bless you man!!! You are my hero! We need more men like you out in front cutting through the lies and the self serving machinations of our politicians and their syncophants.
The left needs more warriors like you!
Being a person who actually knows Roberts Rules of Order and having been in many organizations and thereby know how they are changed to make them "workable", please read "useable to ram something through that the idiots don' t know about", I wold like to comment.....(pun) that this commentary is spot on.
And the libs/progressives think they are so smart! Gotta watch out for anybody that says something like "I'm just a gold ol' boy.....".
GOOD ARTICLE!!
Correction. Since nearly everyone in MASS has healthcare it then makes sense that they don't wish to also pay for all the other states that don't. This is not only a referendum against the foolish healthcare reform push but against Obama's policy himself.
Obama goes to VA and Republican wins. Same thing in NJ and now MASS of all places....haha. Wake up! Stop supporting the rape of the American People. No means NO!
This is not a referendum on health care, this is a referendum on how stupid and selfish 52% of the voters in Massachusetts are.
Nothing more.
There was no increase in votes for the GOP - Brown got the same number of votes as McCain in Nov 2008. But the left - the base of the Democratic Party - did not show up so as to send a message to Obama - no more Corporate Welfare deals.
How else do you explain a drop in the Democratic vote of 900,000?
I am there - I speak with others in the base - and it was "message sending" - not any economic analysis.
If this message is ignored by the Democratic Party, more messages will be sent.
Coakley, and, before her, Scott Harshbarger (with help from the Mass "Supreme Judicial Court") participated in what might charitably called "abuses of process."
In similar US cases, where neo-Salem Witch-o-mania was rampant, defendants sued in civil court and won multi-million-dollar damage settlements against their prosecutors. Coakley may have finessed a suit, by making LeFave "pay" for her release by giving up her right to sue, her right to speak out, her right to rehabilitate her good name. Clever of Coakley. But she had an advantage: Physical freedom vs. civil rights--- free speech, access to civil courts, & the right to try to make a living. I'm reasonably certain that if Amirault-LeFave were to write a coherent first-person account of her travails, it would sell well. Which would give her the bucks to take on the courts, overturn her conviction, win a high-dollar tort suit against Harshbarger, Coakley, et al. Who knows? Perhaps at the end of her 10-year "supervised parole" she can do so. It would be fitting, IMHO.)
Read Dorothy Rabinowitz' WSJ columns "A Darkness Falls In Massachusetts, I, II and III". Find links here: http://mysite.verizon.net/vzex11z4/amichron.html
Her defeat was well-earned. Sad that others may bear the burden of it.
People in Mass like myself know the facts - why spread this crap?
The base sent a message - 900000 did not show up to vote - I guess anything will be thrown at the wall to see if it sticks as a reason to get the Democratic Party to ignore the message and thereby move the Democratic Party to the right .
So given the choice (and a well run campaign) the people in MA said FU to the party line and voted for the person who presented themselves better and had a much better grasp of the issues than Coakley. It also didn't help that Coakley has no personality at all. IMHO she showed her stripes when she went after the $10M fine from the epoxy company and not anything else was a scam in a project that cost XXX Billion and was over plan and over budget from _before_ the start. It's as if everyone
in the statehouse decided that the way they could get the money was to buy a whole crap-load of lottery tickets...
Now I hear on tv that your Insurance could go to 5 or 6 hundred/month. Huh? By now it should be about $2000/month according to the rate it was increasing then.
So now, I'm a little confused.
I was a republican before all this started but I'll never again vote for anyone who refuses to vote to provide a basic necessity to every American man, woman, and child.
we are too ignorant and stupid to think about why we are voting for someone who represents the super-rich and yet he acts like he cares about the common man...we cant see through that
But if a competitor comes along who's willing to sacrifice more than you, then they win and you lose. They get the business, they hire the people, and you get to work for them.