Mario Piperni dot Com

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Republicans are not counting on Bart Stupak to single-handedly kill health care.  They’ve got a plan of their own.  Greg Sargent explains.

Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.

Senior GOP aides have been studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.

At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.

At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.

That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process further.

[...]

There’s a larger game plan here. By making it clear they will do their best to tie reconciliation in procedural knots, Republicans are hoping to frighten House Dems into believing reconciliation is doomed. If House Dems are persuaded that the fix later will fail, they will be less likely to pass the original Senate bill in the first place, pehaps killing it.

I’d like to think that Dems have thought this process through and were expecting Repubs to try something of the sort. To have believed anything less would have been sheer foolishness.  Whatever it is, it’s do or die time for Democrats.  With his speech on Wednesday, the President has burned all bridges, killing off any possibility of retreat.  Democrats must find a way to pass a health care bill or spend the next three years isolated, castrated and impotent.

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(Hat Tip: Balloon Juice)

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This says it well.
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As for the next one, while it illustrates exactly what the broken health care system is doing to the uninsured and underinsured, it does not depict what the yelling in the back office is all about.  It makes it appear that the two sides are having a justifiable disagreement…that somehow Dems and Repubs are both too busy fighting with each other than to actually care about those waiting for reform.  Reality says something differently.

Dems do care about fixing the health care system. It has only been Democratic administrations that have taken on the task of substantially reforming health care. Republicans on the other hand have ignored the problem and blocked reform for the last sixty years. Nothing has changed. Their latest talking point about doing change incrementally is just another transparent ploy in an attempt to block any serious attempt at negotiating a compromise.

The perfect illustration of what is happening is to take the above image and place it in the back office behind the glass. People are dying and Republicans don’t care. The interests of health care industry lobbyists takes clear precedent over the dying of innocent Americans.

Bill Maher made an important point last night. He spoke about Republicans being in rage over the deaths caused by Toyota’s faulty brake system.  They’ve helped convene congressional hearings and investigations and have vowed to do right for Americans.  Good.  That’s exactly what should be done but here’s the irony.

Total number of Americans killed by Toyota’s errors:  34

Number of Americans killed by being uninsured: 45,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

Republican approach?  The Toyota problem must immediately be rectified. As for the broken health care system, leave it be, because according to them, it is the “best health care system in the world.”

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Republican’s ‘goodwill’ intent on reforming a broken health care system is evident in this remark from Rep. John Boehner on why Republicans should attend tomorrow’s health care summit.

“We shouldn’t let the White House have a six-hour taxpayer-funded infomercial on ObamaCare. We need to show up. We need to crash the party.”

Good plan, John.  Politics before country is always the way to go.

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Newt Gingrich believes it’s time for Republicans to “team up” with Democrats and work on health care legislation.  He asks both sides to “be not afraid.”  Very cool.  So what, according to the Gingrich gospels,  is it that both sides should not be afraid of?

Obama should not be afraid to drop the 4,500 pages of Democratic health legislation. He should commit to work in an open, bipartisan manner on new legislation that would earn public support both for its substance and through the transparent process by which it is crafted.

The Republicans should not be afraid to walk in with a series of positive ideas and to work with Democrats on legislation in a genuinely bipartisan fashion. Some GOP partisans so deeply distrust Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid that they assume even meeting with them is an act of betrayal. But Republicans should have confidence that they can always say no to bad ideas. Indeed, they should be open to the possibility of finding supportable measures that would be good for the country and totally compatible with their values.

There’s a pile of bull for you.  Essentially, Gingrich is suggesting that Dems drop the current bills and start from scratch…as if the last year of attempts to arrive at a bipartisan agreement never happened.  As for Republicans, he suggests they walk in with “positive” (aka “conservative“) ideas and to remember they can always say no to “bad” (aka “liberal“) ideas.

Please, have we not heard this crap enough times?  Republicans have made it painfully obvious that they are not willing to compromise on anything. Their real and only strategy is to block health care reform (as well as any other Democratic policy) and to then point to Obama as a miserable failure.  With that, they hope, comes victory in November and then ultimately the White House in 2012.

The President will have another futile shot at arriving at a bipartisan agreement at his health care summit next week.  Dems will do their thing. Republicans will do theirs and Obama will be no closer to having a bipartisan bill to sign than he has today.  Let’s hope this is the final attempt to bring Republicans on board.  There are now at least 11 Democratic Senators ready to push through a health care bill through Congress by means of reconciliation.  One which includes a public option.

If a health care bill not completely written by Republicans has any chance of passing, it’s going to have to be by a 51 vote majority. This is clear.

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At this time there are only two serious contenders in line to be the Republican presidential candidate – Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty. Both are intelligent, articulate and presidential material. Pawlenty breaks some early ground in an upcoming Esquire interview.  Some highlights…

“The Republicans had their shot not long ago to address the real needs and concerns of everyday Americans, and they blew it…. Over the time that they were there and had the leadership opportunity, they blew it. We got fired for a reason.”

“The party got into a whole bunch of corruption and personal scandals that weren’t compatible with the principles it claimed to stand for.”

“We just lost our way. You can’t say that your hallmark issues are that we’re going to control spending, keep taxes low, and make government accountable, and then go to Washington and do the opposite…. Let’s face it, when Republicans had total control over it, they didn’t do what they said they were gonna do.”

“The marketplace measurement in politics is something called an election…. And in 2006 and 2008, the marketplace was telling the Republicans, We prefer the products and services of your competitors.”

“The health-care debate is a pretty good proxy for this struggle between these two views. And in the case of the Republicans, what they see and what they’re rightly concerned about is that it’s another increment down the road toward government taking over more and more things. And it worries people.”

“The Republicans didn’t do a good job of articulating the alternate vision.”

As I said, this guy is the real deal.

Chris Cilizza notes…

“Pawlenty’s critique of his own party is one of the first attempts by a likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate to gain distance from the personalities and policies of the Bush Administration.”

Party strategists have long acknowledged that the presidency of George W. Bush badly damaged the Republican brand in the eyes of voters, an admission that suggests any successful candidate in 2012 will have to make clear to the American people how he (or she) is different from Bush to have any chance of ousting President Obama.

Full interview here.
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They commissioned me to do the book jacket. What do you think?

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TPM:

A can’t miss rung on the ladder to celebrity status in Washington: Newly seated Sen. Scott Brown will write a book about his life leading up to his upset election to succeed the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Brown spokeswoman Gail Gitcho said Wednesday the Massachusetts Republican hopes to provide “insight and encouragement” to others and to ensure the record is “complete and accurate.” She said that part of the book’s proceeds will go to charity.

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This is no surprise.

Senate Republicans don’t have much of an appetite to give President Barack Obama their version of question-and-answer time — not after seeing how Obama handled House Republicans last week.

“We’re always happy to hear from the president, but I don’t really feel any compelling need to do it [on camera],” Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the Republicans’ chief campaign strategist, told POLITICO.

The White House has suggested that it would like Obama to address the Senate GOP Conference, with TV cameras present. Obama administration officials are eager for voters to see Obama operate in a format he relishes — and handle his former Senate colleagues the same way he did last week to House Republicans at their annual retreat.

Naturally, having Obama demolish conservative talking points for all to watch is not something Republicans are eager to have happen again.  They’d rather do their dirty work in the comfort of a Fox interview or at a news conference where there is no one to immediately challenge the nonsense they spew.

It’s the way of cowards and liars.

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The latest from the NO party.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Al, is blocking Senate action on executive branch nominations, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said this afternoon in an e-mail.

…Reid spokeswoman Regan Lachapelle confirmed that Shelby has placed a “blanket hold” on most pending nominations.

By placing a hold, a single senator can stop the Senate from voting on a particular nomination, often as a way of gaining leverage on an unrelated issue. It is not clear when Shelby placed the hold or how many nominees are affected. While individual holds are not unusual, Gary Jacobson, a congressional expert at the University of California at San Diego, said he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold.

With his move, Shelby is holding up at least 70 Obama nominations because …

According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track.

This is what teabaggers should really be screaming about – the fact that a single senator, on a whim,  has the power to hold up the forward movement of government.  Where is the Republican leadership on this?

Right, I forgot, there is no leadership.

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Andrew Sullivan sums up the Republican game plan.

From Day One, the GOP has had one strategy, utterly unrelated to the country’s interests, and utterly divorced from any responsibility for their own past: the destruction of any alternative to Bush-Cheney conservatism.

They believe that the policies of 2000 – 2008 are the right ones for the future, which is why their only economic policies are tax cuts, why they refuse to cut any spending, why they believe in more aggression abroad, and why they still hold to a view of the presidency that places it entirely above the law – or capable of simply pronouncing the law to say what it plainly does not – in order to wage war outside constitutional restraints.

And that appears to be what a large section of the country really, really wants: a second Bush-Cheney administration. If you doubt it, ask any of the current Republican leaders which policies of Bush and Cheney they specifically refuse to continue.

What have Republicans learned from the Bush years?  Nothing.

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As Democrats struggle to pass a health care reform bill, it seems like a good time to remember what the Republican’s game plan was from the beginning. In July 2009, Senator Jim DeMint expressed his thoughts on what his Republican party would do to help fix a broken health care system.  You know, a health care system which is unaffordable for millions of Americans, a health care system which is the number one cause for bankruptcy in the country…a health care system which kills off 45,000 Americans each year because they are inadequately insured…those people, that health care system.

What’s the Republican plan for fixing it all?

“If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

Got that? It’s not about you. It’s not about fixing anything. It never was. It’s about them. It’s about breaking Obama.

Call your Representative and let them know your thoughts on the importance of passing health care reform this year. Do it.

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