It is well worth repeating on this, The Day of the big health-care summit, that President Obama’s biggest critics are as those that a few short months ago were his biggest supporters. All of that has changed and many on the left are quite angry with Obama.
My contention, that this is a failing presidency, pales in comparison to some of the comments I have read and heard from former supporters about the direction that Obama has gone. These attacks on the President are becoming more and more dangerous to the future of our nation, and in fact the future of the very principles these attackers are allegedly trying to push forward.
Tuesday night television talk show commentator Ed Schultz demanded that the President and Democrats in Congress get health care and various other stalled bills, like cap and trade, passed, no matter what it takes to get them passed. Schultz demanded Democratic leaders use reconciliation or anything else needed. He stated that he is unconcerend about the rules of the Senate.
I say all this to you in my continued effort to try and make people aware that as we push the envelope of what can and cannot be done by our government under the laws of our Constitution and whatever we currently have stretched those laws to mean, we create opportunities, precendents, for our opponents to do the same when they take office. For those of you demanding that Democrats do whatever it takes no matter what, including violating the specifics or spirit of the law, you need to be aware of the full impact of what this could mean:
You may be dramatically empowering the future President Palin. Mr. Schultz, is that what you want? Because right now I think you and your fans are giving her the best shot she’ll have.
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I had to watch–a quote would’ve been nice. He did say “by any means necessary…use reconciliation…” I don’t know that he was advocating violating the law, although I’ll acknowledge that you could pull the sound-bite to make that case. He’s talking about using Senate rules, like reconciliation. They could use reconciliation within their rules, or they could decide that a piece of legislation was too important to allow the filibuster rule to apply and limit debate, they could even change the rules. They won’t, not necessarily because they fear retaliation or that their opponents will use the same tactic, but because it would diminish their own power. The filibuster rule gives the minority party power to stop legislation, but it also gives all senators the power to demand pork to secure their cloture votes. I’m on the fence about whether the filibuster is such a good thing. It’s the reason we periodically have difficulty filling federal appointments.
I think it would be better if Mr. Siegel did not join Republicans in exaggerating the current controversy over reconciliation in the Senate.
As we all know, Senate Republicans used reconciliation on many occasions when they held a majority (but not a supermajority). A video of Republican Senator Gregg is now making the rounds in which he makes an impassioned speech (in 2005) defending the use of reconciliation by Republicans to pass legislation. In his speech he insists over and over again that this procedure is fully in accord with Senate rules. So what changed since 2005? Nothing, except Republicans are no longer in the majority.
So once again we are told that a practice is bad when Democrats do it, but perfectly okay when Republicans do it. Have we not had enough of this hypocrisy?
Mr. S., you make a good point – a lot of the people who are unhappy about what is going on are liberals, not conservatives.
Conservatives keep saying that polls show 60% of Americans oppose the current health care bills. What they keep leaving out is that about 10 of that 60 are people who oppose the bills because they are not liberal enough.
Why do conservatives keep leaving that rather important fact out? I’ll give you three guesses.