For weeks, President Obama has been demanding an “up or down
vote” on health care legislation. So where is the president now
that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she would like to pass the
Senate health care bill in the House without allowing an up or
down vote on it?
Pelosi signaled on Monday that she favors Rep. Louise
Slaughter’s proposal to pass the health care bill, in the words
of the Washington Post, “without having members vote on
it.” Using a House rule called a “self-executing rule,” members
would vote on a package of amendments to the Senate bill, and the
passage of those changes would by rule “deem” the Senate bill
passed. But the House would never vote on the Senate bill
itself.
That’s an awfully peculiar step to take for a party that
has spent the last few weeks clamoring about how democratic it
would be to do away with the filibuster so we could at last have
a simple majority vote on the health care bill in the Senate.
What’s democratic about voting on a bill without voting on it?
And by the way, the self-executing rule also curtails floor
debate and disallows amendments. Hail, democracy!
The talk about democracy is all self-serving spin, of
course. The president wants this bill and he’s perfectly happy to
use every procedure at his disposal to limit the right of the
minority in Congress — specifically because he knows that
minority represents the will of the majority of Americans on this
particular issue.
If the President had a majority of the people on his side,
he wouldn’t have to resort to parliamentary trickery to pass this
bill. It is precisely because “democracy” is turning against him
that he is rushing to muscle this thing into law before the next
election. That is when, by all accounts, the majority appears
likely to turn his party into a minority — primarily out of
anger and frustration at being treated not like citizens
participating in their own government but subjects receiving
dictates from on high.
This is not the administration Americans thought they were
electing in 2008. Back then, Obama promised to unify the country.
He promised to halt “business as usual” in Washington and bring
everyone together to reach common ground. In fact, he said he
would do on health care exactly the opposite of what he is doing
now.
Former New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Fergus
Cullen recalled this week what Obama said during his editorial
board meeting with the Concord Monitor back in October
of 2007. Campaigning as the Great Unifier, he said then, “We’re
not going to pass universal health care with a, with a
50-plus-one strategy.”
Today, he is trying to pass universal health care with a
50-plus-one strategy. And in the health care plan he is trying to
pass is a personal coverage mandate that he also said on the
campaign trail he didn’t support.
If the president were true to his campaign promises, he
would immediately nix the Slaughter scheme and demand a real,
fair vote on health care legislation. But everyone who went
looking for those health care meetings on C-SPAN already knows he
isn’t true to his campaign promises.
Obama doesn’t care if his quest for this massive reworking
of American health care splits the country apart. He doesn’t care
if it raises taxes on the middle class or increases the deficit
or forces people to change insurance plans they love or doesn’t
actually fix the things it is supposed to fix. He cares if he
goes down in the history books as the president who got health
care reform passed.
That’s not the kind of president most Americans who voted
for Obama thought they were getting. But that’s the kind of
president they got. It’s no wonder so many of them are suffering
from buyer’s remorse only a year into his term.
