I can’t believe I was stupid enough to believe Barney Frank when he said, on Tuesday night, that he couldn’t support any effort to thwart the will of the voters by passing Obamacare using procedural skullduggery. By Wednesday evening, he was on board with a process that would render the Massachusetts election meaningless.
Frank now favors a plan in which the House would vote for the Senate bill, as is, then use the budget reconciliation process (a.k.a. the nuclear option) to add items that he and other House Dems want to see in the final legislation. This would, of course, circumvent the 60-vote rule that Frank himself said should not be violated:
Those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of the process.
But hey, that “listen to the voters” attitude is so “Tuesday night.” Twenty-four hours later, he was with those delusional Democrats in the White House and Congress who still don’t understand the message the voters sent to them from Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia. He actually seems to think the voters will accept BS like this:
As long as it’s being done in a way that’s invulnerable to charges that it was jammed through, or the rules were disregarded. That’s what I was afraid of was a disregard for the procedural rules: Bending the Byrd rule out of shape, or doing something with Paul Kirk’s vote while awaiting certification–those things would be fatal.
I’ve got some news for Barney: Exit polls and focus groups have made it clear that Bay State voters elected Brown for the express purpose of stopping Obamacare. If Frank thinks the voters were angry on Tuesday, he hasn’t seen anything like the rage that will result if he and his accomplices jam this thing through now. As Scott Brown put it to Time:
I think they’ll pay for it dearly in 2010. I think people will be outraged, regardless of party.
They will indeed. If Barney Frank wants to see what “fatal” really looks like, all he and his delusional colleagues have to do is ignore the warning they got in Massachusetts. If the Democrats are still crazy enough to defy the voters on Obamacare, there will be a reckoning in November that will make 1994 look like a picnic.
Comments 4
But there weren’t any exit polls?
Analysis I’ve heard in the UK is that again - and a key point you consistently miss - is that a sizeable portion are voting against the Dems in protest that the reform is actually too weak.
The other point is that Mass already has reformed, near-universal healthcare and this vote was much more about the economy than healthcare.
Posted 21 Jan 2010 at 7:06 am ¶Wrong again, Marc. They didn’t publicize it while the voting was going on, but exit polling was indeed done. Click here to see the story (I’ve also added the link to the post).
52% of the voters said they wanted the Dems to stop on the “reform” thing, and 42% gave that as the main reason they came out to vote.
Posted 21 Jan 2010 at 7:50 am ¶That was done by a firm in the pocket of the Republicans, not a news agency, and got almost zero coverage. There are no decent polls, but the data from the past months consistently shows a large number of people are unhappy with the reform from the left, not the right.
As for Brown, he supports MassCare I believe.
Posted 21 Jan 2010 at 8:58 am ¶Sorry, Marc. No sale. This is a respected firm (by both sides of the aisle) and other polls have shown the same results.
As for Romneycare, its failure is precisely why Massachusetts voters reject a nationalized version.
And Brown’s support of that bill is the main black mark on his career. He has now been sent to D.C. to atone for that error.
Posted 21 Jan 2010 at 9:03 am ¶Post a Comment