Passing a Shell of A Bill: Congress’ Secret Plan to Ram Through Health Care Reform

Passing a Shell of A Bill: Congress’ Secret Plan to Ram Through Health Care Reform
The Scoop at The Heritage Foundation
With the President and Congress’s plan to pass comprehensive health care reform reaching increasingly high levels of unpopularity, and reconciliation becoming an impediment, the leadership of the Senate is rumored to be preparing a new secret plan to railroad the bill through the Senate in record time by using a seldom used parliamentary procedure.
Their plan is to proceed to a House passed non-health care bill to provide a shell of legislation to give Obamacare a ride to the House then to the President’s desk. Sound confusing? We lay out the steps below, but essentially the Senate would pass health care reform as an amendment to a completely unrelated bill so the Senate and House could act quickly and without further debate. Even worse? Nobody really knows what that legislation looks like but they plan on voting for it anyway.
Right now, the Senate Finance Committee is in the midst of marking up health care reform “legislation.” Due to Senate procedure, what they are actually marking up is a 200+ page conceptual framework of the actual legislation, not a real bill. That means that not only has no Senator even read the bill but, there is a high probability that the bill hasn’t even been written yet. If the Committee sticks to their artificial deadline of completing work by this Friday then they would have passed a conceptual document reforming the nation’s health care system, spending trillions, without ever seeing an estimated 1,500 pages of legislation, which may or may not be written.
The current plan is to start debate on Obamacare as early as next week under the following four-step scenario:
STEP ONE:

The Senate Finance Committee will finish work on the marking up of Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) conceptual framework for legislation by this Friday. Baucus has not unveiled final legislation and, according to the Associated Press, he added some new language to the mark up today. AP reports that “under pressure from fellow Democrats, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee decided to commit an additional $50 billion over a decade toward making insurance more affordable for working class families.”

Senators have not been provided any real legislation and are offering amendments this week to Baucus’ 200+ page outline. It is expected that at the end of the process the Senate Finance Committee may produce a bill longer than the 1,000 page House bill that proved so controversial over the August recess. Many Senators are upset that they don’t have final language for a bill, yet still they sit in a Committee Hearing Room this week marking up a draft document that is not in the form of legislative language. The plan is to have this document voted out of the Senate Finance Committee by Friday.

STEP TWO:

Next, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will take the final product of the Senate Finance Committee and merge it with the product of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee. This was the late Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) bill, introduced by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), which passed the HELP Committee on July 15, 2009 on a party line vote. Remember, most Senators will still not know what they voted for in the Finance Committee.

STEP THREE:

Senator Reid will then move to proceed to H.R. 1586, a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received by certain TARP recipients. This bill was the bill passed by the House in the wake of the AIG bonus controversy and is currently sitting on the Senate Legislative Calendar. Reid will move to proceed, and he will need 60 votes to act on this bill. After the motion is approved, he will then offer a complete substitute bill purportedly including the combined Senate HELP and Finance Committee products. This means that the entire health care reform effort will be included as an amendment to a TARP bill that has been collecting dust in the Senate for months.

STEP FOUR:

For this strategy to work, the proponents would need to hold together the liberal caucus of 57 Democrats, 2 Independents (Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont), and a potential new member replacing the late Senator Kennedy. This scenario would most likely be implemented after the Massachusetts state legislature gives Governor Deval Patrick the power to appoint a new Senator and that Senator is seated by the Senate. According to CQ, the state legislature may pass a bill and present it to Governor Patrick by next week.

Once the Senate passes a bill and sends it to the House, all the House would have to do is pass the bill, without changes, and President Obama will be presented with his health care reform measure thereby transforming within a few weeks 1/6th of the US economy. If this plan does not work, the Senate and House Leadership may consider using reconciliation to pass the legislation.
Does this sound like a transparent, bipartisan and effective way to change the way millions of Americans get their health care? Of course not.

Democrats reject GOP amendment to require health bill to be available online before vote
WASHINGTON
Senate Finance Committee Democrats have just rejected a GOP amendment that would have required a health overhaul bill to be available online for 72 hours before the committee votes.
Republicans argued that transparency is an Obama administration goal. They also noted that their constituents are demanding that they read bills before voting.

Democrats said it was a delay tactic that could have postponed a vote for weeks.

The Democrats say that unlike other committees, the Finance Committee works off conceptual language that describes policies — instead of legislative language that ultimately becomes law, and which the GOP amendment would have required. Democrats accepted an alternate amendment to make conceptual language available online before a vote.

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Wild Thing’s comment…….
So, Congress passed the stimulus package without the majority of it’s members having read the bill. Now comes the ultimate abdication of responsibility and duty: passing a bill that hasn’t even been written yet. Could this be any more un-democratic?
This is another reason why any bill passed anywhere in the country needs to be a ONE ITEM bill.
It will simply not matter even a little who is in Congress in December 2010 if any form of this thing is passed and signed. It is irreversible and ends the Free Economy and, eventually (not long), the Republic.
STEP THREE: Senator Reid will then move to proceed to H.R. 1586, a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received by certain TARP recipients. This bill was the bill passed by the House in the wake of the AIG bonus controversy and is currently sitting on the Senate Legislative Calendar. Reid will move to proceed, and he will need 60 votes to act on this bill.
That may be the saving grace. Hopefully even the RINOS will see what a slimy, sleazy process this is.
2010 is a long way off. We need to keep pounding out the message. But it needs to be refreshed now and again so as not to become boring and repetitive. People are getting motivated. We need to keep that motivation in high gear for a year. A daunting task.
Because of the Tea Parties, the Townhalls meetings, phone calls and letting politicans know how we the people feel right now at this time the votes aren’t there and they aren’t going to be there for any substantial increase in the government’s control over health care. The votes aren’t there, in large part, because the money isn’t there. The government doesn’t have it and can’t raise it. Even if they managed to roll a shiny new health care program off the lot this year, the repo man would take it back before most of its provisions could take effect.
We are going to be dismantling our welfare state in the decades to come because we can’t pay for it. Nothing Congress does today can change that reality.
Socialism doesn’t work. The left has been able to keep the scam going for years, but it is unraveling now.
Keep fighting the good fight, secure in the knowledge that, in the long run we can’t lose. Eventually liberty will triumph because our society is deeply committed to it and nothing else works nearly as well. In our current circumstances nothing else will work at all.

….Thank you Mark for sending this to me.
Mark
3rd Mar.Div. 1st Battalion 9th Marine Regiment
1/9 Marines aka The Walking Dead
VN 66-67