Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
March 25, 2010
In This Issue . . .
1. Time For Him to Stupak His Bags
2. You Don't 'Backfire' by Electing Your Own Guys, Unless They're Named Specter
3. Now, Even His Legislation Comes With Expiration Dates
4. Our Erroneous Assumption Was that These Guys Wanted to Stay in Office
5. Addenda
Here's your morning Jolt!
Enjoy,
Jim
1. Time For Him to Stupak His Bags
This morning on NRO, I look at the prospects for premature termination of Bart Stupak's career in Congress.
Cartoonist Henry Payne thinks of another Bart in depicting Stupak.
2. You Don't 'Backfire' by Electing Your Own Guys, Unless They're Named Specter
What's gotten into the Boston Herald? Their article headline: "Republicans Feeling Blue As Scott Brown Win Backfires."
They base this on a gloating comment from state Democratic party chairman John Walsh. Hey, laugh it up, fuzzball, you're the first Massachusetts state party chair to lose anything in that neck of the woods in a generation. You've become so synonymous with Beantown failure that these days Bill Buckner's making jokes at your expense. The Herald also quotes an angry tea-party activist, but perhaps I repeat myself.
Their front-page headline is "Where Is He Now?", which would make sense if he had, say, been abducted. But the pretty clear answer is "In the Senate, voting against this crap, just like he promised he would."They're a newspaper; you would think they'd know that. What, did Michael Graham take a sick day? Is he not around to straighten out that crew?
La Shawn Barber, writing at Michelle Malkin's site: "Hopes definitely were high after Brown's win, but optimism ebbs and flows. He's one more Republican in the Senate, and that's good enough for now. So gloat on, libs. I truly, sincerely, seriously hope November 2010 elections will be a blood bath."
The Lonely Conservative declares this silly: "Please, if not for the Scott Brown win, the Democrats in the Senate wouldn't have to resort to using reconciliation as a way to fix their own bill, which Nancy Pelosi didn't have the votes to pass in the House. They wouldn't have had to resort to back room deals, bribes, and thuggery. They saw the writing on the wall after the Brown win and they chose to ignore it. They chose to ignore the will of the people they represent. That's no reflection on Scott Brown, it's a reflection on the Democrats. All this has done is reveal the Democrats are perfectly willing to rule like dictators and tyrants, rather than representatives. It's disgusting and they'll get their due come November."
The Herald's treatment has the usually-mild mannered James Joyner shaking his head: "The particular criticism of Brown here is idiotic. He campaigned quite reasonably expecting to be able to vote on health care reform. Instead, the Democrats conspired to use a parliamentary trick to get around the inconvenience of having lost a seat in an honest election. That ain't Brown's fault. And Walsh's crowing is absurd, too. The Brown election was seen as a mini-national referendum on ObamaCare. In the days after, several prominent Democratic Senators were publicly opposed to ignoring that outcome by either rushing through a vote before Brown could be seated or using the reconciliation process to ratify the prior vote and get around the need to have another cloture vote. The fact that the Democratic leadership was willing to do it nonetheless was a testament to their desperation to pass the measure, not a reaction to Brown's win. It wouldn't have been 'necessary' with Martha Coakley in the seat, of course, but the outcome would have been the same."
3. Now, Even His Legislation Comes With Expiration Dates
AP: "Hours after President Barack Obama signed historic health care legislation, a potential problem emerged. Administration officials are now scrambling to fix a gap in highly touted benefits for children. Obama made better coverage for children a centerpiece of his health care remake, but it turns out the letter of the law provided a less-than-complete guarantee that kids with health problems would not be shut out of coverage."
Then, over in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "The bill Obama signed leaves a giant loophole, one that will be fixed if the reconciliation bill now being debated in the Senate passes. The law exempts current insurance policies from having to include coverage for the young adults."
This bill doesn't even do two of the things they've been bragging about for weeks? The Senate Democrats who wrote this would have to double their efforts just to reach half-assed. Did anybody actually read this thing? We know Dennis Moore didn't.
Mary Katharine Ham: "Nobody worry. Just because the legislative language doesn't cover one of the president's priorities, which he has included in every speech of the last week and after the bill's passage, doesn't mean that there will be unforeseen consequences therein for you and your family. Other than that, this baby is totally air-tight. Trust them."
TigerHawk: "If you needed more damning evidence that even the White House does not know what is in its own legislation, that would be it. These are the wages of haste, and the direct result of the decision by the president and his lieutenants in the Congress to rush this through before the November elections loom too large."
Tom Maguire wins the "headline I wish I had written" award with "It Looks Like The Dems Forgot To Repeal The Law Of Unintended Consequences," and notes: "I smell a rat. The recently signed bill is simply the legislation passed last Christmas Eve by the Senate; it is the proposed reconciliation effort that should be chock full of surprises. So rather than try to convince us that it was only after the bill was signed that top Dems read it and realized there was a problem, why not tell us what the President knew and when he knew it? There is just no way some heroic Dem staffer fought off his or her hangover and discovered this glitch in the last day or two. How long have then been keeping this little secret while the President oversold the bill to the public? And how did Republicans miss it all these months? What kind of rabid noise machine are we running, anyway?"
Responding to the AP writer's line, Moe Lane observes: "Obama's public statements have conveyed the impression that the new protections for kids were more sweeping and straightforward. . . . Also: Obama's public statements have also conveyed the equally-false impression that the President has a clue about what's actually in his signature legislation, but you can't really expect the AP to write that out. Although one gets the impression that the thought might have actually passed through the head of the writer. Which would be an improvement, at least. Anyway, you'd think that at this point the President would have the mother-wit to check the speeches that they hand to him. He just doesn't like to learn, does he?"
I keep waiting for some wonky type like Spruiell or Foster to inform us, "In the second paragraph on page 547 of the health-care bill signed into law, with no apparent explanation, is a recipe for chicken pot pie" (see Addenda).
4. Our Erroneous Assumption Was that These Guys Wanted to Stay in Office
Patrick Ruffini is one of those guys who probably has more political insight in his grocery list than most people put in their masters' theses, so I quibble with him at my peril. And it's not that I disagree a great deal of his assessment of where the GOP could have been stronger in fighting the health-care fight.
In a nutshell (but read the whole thing, seriously): "When it comes to health care policy, conservatives have been seriously outgunned. And I say this in all fairness to the friends I have who work night and day on free market solutions to health care. On economics, you always know what the conservative answer is: tax cuts and generally hands-off regulatory policies to spur economic growth. No matter how good the Democrats' promises sound, we return to these simple, pro-growth touchstones that resonate with a majority of Americans who intuitively get that you can't micromanage your way to a better future. On health care, I have no idea what our basic guiding principle is. Seriously, I don't. . . . This may be oversimplified. There are certainly many very good conservative health care scholars whose work I should have been reading more closely these last few years. But politics is a battle of perceptions, and the perception -- that became reality -- was that Republicans brought a knife to a gun fight when it came a debate about the scope and reach of health care reform. We may have won the political battle over health care, in that a majority of Americans opposed Obamacare, but sometimes it is the policy battles that set the tone for the future political battleground, moving the entire spectrum on which they are fought further left."
But I think there's an error in perceiving the passage of health care as an ipso facto "failure" on the part of conservatism. (The 2008 election was a failure of conservatism, for many reasons, too many to go into here.) Once you gave a Democratic president 59-to-60-to-59 senators, and 250-plus House members, the passage of something gargantuan, invasive, and expensive was a near-certainty. In the end, public opinion froze with a majority opposing it this summer and never budged. The grassroots got fired up in an unprecedented manner. The vote turned into a suicide mission for a lot of House Democrats, and another 34 couldn't bring themselves to be associated with the mess. The House Progressive Caucus's threats about the public option were revealed to be meaningless. That's obviously not what righties wanted to achieve when the final vote was cast, but considering where public opinion, momentum, and legislators' views stood in January 2009, it looks pretty darn Herculean.
5. Addenda
I thought of that chicken pot pie joke, but the bill actually does include a requirement that most restaurants post the calorie count of their food on the menu. Yeah, that's the cause of our health problems; Americans are diving into the Champps Pepperjack Bacon Stack burger because they think it's on par with celery. You know, not even Mussolini regulated the marinara. When our government is even more of a micromanager than actual fascist regimes, we know we're at least another 20 printings of Jonah's book away from normalcy. . . . So, speaking of Jonah, is it just me, or does every edition of his oh-boo-hoo-once-a-week newsletter begin with a "This week's edition will be really short because"? . . . When did every television channel forget its purpose in life? MTV doesn't show much music, the History Channel shows programs that have little or nothing to do with history, there are non-animated shows on the Cartoon network, and SyFy's new spelling fits because its programming directors appear to have no interest in science fiction. Comedy Central isn't all that funny, plenty of A&E's shows seem neither artistic nor entertaining, and you can watch hours of The Learning Channel and actually lose knowledge. (Any given program on Lifetime only feels like it drags on for decades.)
Yet Fox News has plenty of foxes. |
