In a 2006 speech to the National Press Club about lobbying
reform, Illinois Senator Barack Obama waxed eloquent about the
malevolent influence of special interests on Beltway politics: “The
American people are tired of a Washington that’s only open to those
with the most cash and the right connections. They’re tired of a
political process where the vote you cast isn9;t as important as
the favors you can do.” And, alluding to that infamous hive of scum
and villainy, the Bush administration, he added: “When big oil
companies are invited into the White House for secret energy
meetings, it’s no wonder they end up with billions in tax breaks
while Americans still struggle to fill up their gas tanks and heat
their homes.” It appears, however, that talk is a good deal cheaper
than political influence.
Four years later, Obama had long since moved to
Pennsylvania Avenue and was receiving frequent visits from people
with more than a passing resemblance to the iniquitous special
interests whose influence had once filled him with righteous
indignation. Not only did he conduct intimate tête-à-têtes with
energy executives, meetings that outraged more than a few
progressive advocacy groups, he was receiving a steady stream of
visitors with much at stake in the health care reform legislation
that was being hotly debated in Congress and in the public square.
Many conservatives and libertarians worried that secret deals were
being cut, and this anxiety was by no means ameliorated when we
learned Richard Trumka was getting more face time with the
President than was Mrs. Obama.
Then the other shoe dropped. Last October, it came out
that the Obama administration had been issuing ObamaCare waivers to
a list of unions and corporations that correlated rather
suspiciously to the donor rolls of the Democratic National
Committee. The indignation caused by this news increased
proportionally as the total number of special dispensations grew to
111 by November and to twice that amount in December. And there was
general outrage when an additional 507 new waivers were posted to
the approval list the day after Obama’s State of the Union Address.
The list now includes
more than 1,000 unions and other entities. Thus, several
Republican committee chairmen in the House are interested in all of
those visits the President received during the run-up to the final
ObamaCare vote.
Fred Upton (R-MI), Chairman of the House Energy and
Commerce Committee, sent a
letter to Nancy-Ann DeParle, who until recently ran the White
House Office for Health Reform (WHOHR), requesting records of those
meetings: “We are troubled by the secret negotiations which
apparently took place between the WHOHR and outside interest
groups, especially given the specific promises of transparency
regarding health care reform.… We write to you today in the hope
that the Administration will belatedly uphold the President’s
promise of transparency.” However, despite the President’s
frequently repeated promise to run “the most open and transparent
administration in history,” the White House has refused to release
any documentation beyond the meager snippets already sent to a few
Democrats last year.
What could possibly justify this latest broken promise?
According to Bob Bauer, who ironically needed a
waiver from the President’s famous “ethics pledge” in order to
qualify for the post of White House Counsel, complying with
congressional oversight just involves
far too much work: “To provide all possible information
encompassed by your request… would constitute a vast and expensive
undertaking.” The letter also contained this familiar-sounding
passage: “To the extent you are also seeking documents reflecting
internal deliberations and communications; it also would implicate
longstanding Executive Branch confidentiality interests.” Why does
this sound familiar? It is how the Bush White House responded to
initial questions from Congress about Vice President Cheney’s
“secret meetings” with those evil oil industry
executives.
In addition to their requests for information about
Obama’s closed-door health care meetings, Chairman Upton has also
shown an interest in the rules and procedures governing the
issuance of the ObamaCare waivers. Upton and Cliff Stearns,
chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, have
sent a
missive to the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance
Oversight (CCIIO), the bureaucracy charged with
actually issuing the waivers: “Your office has approved waivers
from [ObamaCare’s] annual limits requirements for 222 applicants.
In a Nov. 30, 2010 meeting with Ranking Minority Member Michael
Burgess, you stated that your office had also denied waiver
requests. We would appreciate if your office would explain how a
decision is made on whether compliance… is necessary.”
In the same spirit of “transparency” that animated the
White House response to Upton’s document request, the former
Democrat chairman of Energy & Commerce howled with indignation
at the CCIIO information request. Henry Waxman (D-CA) hilariously
claimed that it would be “disruptive” to the normal operations of
the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) to provide the
requested data. Upton’s
reply was characteristically ironic: “Last year the Democratic
majority opted to place HHS in charge of the health care of every
single American. If the HHS bureaucracy can handle monitoring every
doctor and patient relationship in the United States, it can handle
a simple request for documents from an American public hungering to
finally know the details about the administration’s health care
takeover.”
To date, however, the Obama administration and its health
care bureaucrats have resisted disclosing any information it can
possibly keep from the public eye. The information
extracted from John Larson, Deputy Administrator and Director
of CCIIO, at a late February hearing of Energy & Commerce was
studiously vague about the criteria used to determine the winners
and losers of the waiver lottery. And despite the President’s
ostensible concern about how tired the electorate is “of a
political process where the vote you cast isn’t as important as the
favors you can do,” it would appear that Chairman Upton will have
to issue subpoenas to the White House to discover if the special
dispensations from ObamaCare’s provisions are connected with secret
deals struck behind closed doors with the President or his
minions.
As then Senator Obama so eloquently phrased it in 2006,
the voters are indeed “tired of a Washington that’s only open to
those with the most cash and the right connections.” Unfortunately
the blight of backroom deals, bribes and old-fashioned
obstructionism has metastasized exponentially since he became
President. The only cure is to repeal and replace ObamaCare as well
as the man who signed it into law.
