Yesterday afternoon, in an obvious allusion to the “Cornhusker Kickback,” the President said he didn’t want provisions in the final Obamacare bill that were there for the sole purpose of buying votes:
My proposal also gets rid of many of the provisions that had no place in health care reform – provisions that were more about winning individual votes in Congress than improving health care.
But he didn’t say anything about to buying votes with judgeships:
Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House … One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah.
So, should we be worried about about Rep. Matheson? Yep.
The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson’s brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
That’s right. Having told the American people that he wasn’t involved in all those backroom vote-buying deals that went on in Congress last year, Obama is trading judgeships for votes.
As Talleyrand would phrase it, this is worse than a crime—it’s a blunder. This very kind of skulduggery has been an important cause of public revulsion against Obamacare.
The brazen hypocrisy of this will make the voters even angrier, and it will make it absurdly easy for the the GOP to stoke public outrage. As Mitch McConnell put it yesterday:
If this bill is somehow passed … every election in America this Fall will be a referendum on this issue.
Yep.
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