Friday, March 19, 2010

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

Now that public debate has been banished from Congress, and all legislative business is conducted in secret, trying to determine what is happening in Washington is a lot like it used to be trying to figure out who was up and who was down in the Soviet Union. I don’t know any more than you do, or Chris Matthews does, or Rush Limbaugh, or John McCain, for that matter. This has never stopped me from drawing conclusions, however.

First, Pelosi does not have the votes to pass Obamacare. If, for example, she had the votes at 7:33pm on Monday, the vote would have been held at 7:34pm on Monday. That no such vote has been called can mean only one thing.

Second, floating the idea of the “Slaughter Solution,” by which the bill is deemed to have been “passed” without actually voting on it, is a sign the Democratic leadership believes they are unlikely to get the votes needed to pass it. The deem-and-pass option cannot be anything other than a desperation tactic since, even if it succeeds, it will lead to lengthy, bitter litigation and years of political fallout. The Democrats are clearly willing to take a major hit in the mid-term elections over this, but the use of deem-and-pass could turn out to be an issue in the next several elections.

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I have an observation on this process.

First, if Obamacare goes down to defeat, there will be one reason: the left’s puzzling obsession with forcing people who disapprove of abortion to pay for abortions.

Public funding for abortion has never been a popular idea with the American people. While polling numbers on abortion issues change (slowly) over the years, the majority view has long been that abortion should be generally available, with some restrictions, but should not be paid for with tax dollars. Public funding of abortions has never had the support of more than 30% of Americans.

Also, since the vast majority of abortions are elective procedures, the issue is actually tangential to healthcare concerns at the heart of Obamacare. Nevertheless, Senate Democrats insisted that this be part of their bill and, once a few legislators were purchased and a few arms twisted, sixty votes were found.

Since both houses of Congress must pass the same bill, the normal procedure would be for the differences between the House bill and the Senate bill to be compromised in committee, and then for both houses to pass the compromise measure. However, with the election of Scott Brown, the Senate cannot pass a second healthcare bill. Thus, the Democrats are stuck with the Senate bill already passed, complete with taxpayer-subsidized abortions. The House must pass that bill, or there will be no Obamacare.

Without the abortion provisions, the bill would be easily passed. Certainly, the Republicans could do nothing about it. The only problem has been that a number of Democrats are reluctant to vote for public funding of abortions.

And really, why shouldn’t they be?

This is one thing about the left I will never understand. Without the abortion feature, there would probably have been some Republicans, in both houses, voting for the damn thing. Pelosi and Reid wouldn’t even have had to break a sweat, and there would have been no need for the Louisiana Purchase or the Cornhusker Kickback or any of the other new forms of corruption that are so novel and clever that they each get cute little names. Obama would have signed the bill months ago.

So why did they do this? Why is it so important to left-wingers that citizens who disapprove of abortion, for reasons of conscience or religious conviction, MUST be forced to pay for them? I invite any of you, dear readers, to tell me. I just don’t get it.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

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