The vote was taken and the deed is done: healthcare reform legislation passed the U.S. Senate in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve with every Democratic and independent senator voting for it and every Republican voting against it. No big surprise there. It is also no big surprise that we will continue to hear the big lie from right-wing blowhards that this piece of legislation is so bad that it will knock the Democrats out of power in 2010.
If Republican members of Congress really thought that the healthcare bill would be the death of the Democratic majority, then why did they fight so hard to prevent every vote on it? Why did they use every stalling tactic in the parliamentary playbook to drag this process out for weeks and months? Why did they filibuster to the bitter end in the Senate to delay the final vote until the approach of a winter storm on the day before Christmas?
One of the basic lessons you learn in politics is not to get in the way of your opponent when he’s shooting himself in the foot. If Republican senators and House members really and truly believed this bill would be such a disaster for the Democrats, they would have gotten out of the way and allowed Democrats to pass it as quickly as possible — thus giving the GOP more time to campaign against the bill as it moves into the 2010 campaign cycle.
No, this is a case where actions speak much louder than words. The desperation of the Republicans — a desperation that reached levels of shrieking hysteria at the town hall meetings — tells me that GOP politicians are very afraid that this bill, once it’s signed into law, becomes another issue that Democrats will use against them for the next generation. Just as they did with Social Security and Medicare, Republicans have put themselves on the wrong side of history where health insurance reform is concerned.
It is amusing to see politicians like Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss, Johnny Isakson and Sonny Perdue complaining that “deals” were made to secure the votes of Democratic senators like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu.
“There have been deals cut behind closed doors that are going to provide benefits for individual senators and their states, whether it’s Vermont, Nebraska, or Florida,” Chambliss grumped.
Oh really? Let’s go back in time to the year 2003 and recall the events surrounding the passage of another healthcare bill with a high cost to taxpayers: the Medicare prescription drug benefit proposed by George W. Bush and the Republican leadership that then controlled Congress.
When that particular piece of legislation was originally drafted, Bush administration officials claimed that the 10-year cost of the program would be $400 billion. The measure was seen as an attempt by Republicans to buy the votes of senior citizens in Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.
When the final version of Bush’s Medicare bill came before the House on Nov. 22, 2003, the House vote was initially 219-215 against passage after the standard 15-minute time limit for voting. The House leadership, headed by Speaker Dennis Hastert and Texas bully Tom DeLay, then held the vote open for an unprecedented three hours as they twisted arms and tried to persuade some Republican House members to change their “no” votes to “yes” votes.
Nick Smith, a Republican House member from Michigan, later claimed that he was offered campaign assistance for his son, who was running to replace him in the House, if he would change his vote to “yes.” Several other congressmen also switched their votes, including Democrats Jim Marshall and David Scott of Georgia, and the bill finally was adopted on a vote of 220-215.
It was later reported that Bush administration officials had concealed the true cost of the Medicare drug benefit — by early 2005, the 10-year estimate of the program’s cost was raised to $1.2 trillion, which prompted some Republican congressmen to say they would never have voted for the bill if they had been aware of the program’s real cost. That $1.2 trillion price tab, by the way, is much higher than the estimated cost of the current healthcare reform bill being pushed by Democrats.
Sonny Perdue was in his first year as governor in 2003. I don’t recall him ever raising a single protest against either the cost of the Bush healthcare bill or the way in which the Republican leadership attempted to change votes by offering bribes.
I also don’t recall either Chambliss or Isakson protesting the manner by which the Bush bill was adopted. In fact, they voted for it too. Isakson was among the 220 House members who voted for the Medicare Part D bill in November 2003. Chambliss voted for the Medicare bill on Nov. 25, 2003 as the Senate passed it, 54-44.
Those actions during 2003 make laughable the current protests from Perdue, Chambliss, and Isakson. They are actually quite happy to see the passage of high-cost healthcare legislation — as long as their own party is humping for it.
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative Treasury Department official during the Ronald Reagan administration, wrote recently in Forbes:
It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt.
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