It’s amusing to see the Republicans complain about the rule the House of Representatives will use to pass health care reform. You can call it a sleight of hand if you want, because it is. The House doesn’t like the Senate bill, especially the goodies set aside for senators Bill Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Ben Nelson, so they don’t want to vote for the Senate bill. Unfortunately, they have to vote for it in order for it to pass. To get around the optical problem presented by this, the House will create a rule that ‘deems’ the Senate bill passed even as it amends the bill to strip it of its offending language. In other words, there will be one vote instead of two. Grown-ups wouldn’t see any difference because in neither case would the House be endorsing language that they are deliberately stripping out of the bill. But, by avoiding voting for it in a stand alone bill, they can argue slightly more persuasively that they didn’t vote for it at all. They don’t have to say that they voted against it after they voted for it, because they voted against it when they voted for it.
It’s laughable to try to argue that this is unconstitutional. What it is is disappointing…for Republicans. They thought the election of Scott Brown was going to matter. It didn’t. It was already too late when the Senate passed their version of the bill on Christmas Eve. If the House has the votes to pass the bill under this rule, then the game is over. And then the people will realize that Congress has passed the bill that the Republicans offered as a substitute for HillaryCare. Yeah, the republicans got their victory after all. And they call it socialism.
