Civics anyone?

It is almost incredible for anyone with the slightest acquaintance with American government to watch the current controversy over the pending Health Care Bill without shuddering.

The Democrats in Congress and the minions of the President must be the stupidest students of government that ever attended schooling in this country (which they are not) or else they must think that the American public are too stupid to see what is happening (which they are not).  So why are they staking so much of their credibility on this fight to the point of ignoring joblessness, economics, and military and foreign policy.  A good guess is that they want control … control through government … something some would call Socialism.

Lets look at what has happened with the Bill.  First, the House passed their version … a nearly 3 thousand-page monstrosity that no member had read, much less understood.  They did this by bribing a group of “right to life” Congressmen by taking out funding for abortion in order to get narrow passage.  They then sent this missive to the Senate for consideration.  Upon its arrival the Senate promptly ignored the House’s efforts and proceeded to pass their own 2500 to 3000 page jerk at the heart of the Republic, an atrocity even more repugnant.

The Senate Democrat leadership could not get enough support for their bill to overcome the objections of some of their members and the filibuster of the Republicans, so they too resorted to bribing members for votes.  Their bill included bribes to Senators from Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida and possibly Arkansas, but tellingly, re-inserted language funding abortion in order to placate Liberal Senators.  With the suborned votes, the Senate passed their … also unread … bill and sent their child to the House for consideration.

This is the point where the Civics broke down.  There was no way in Hell that a health bill with abortion and sweetheart bribes in it could pass the House, so the Leadership did not bring it to a vote where it would have surely been defeated.  Conversely, the Leadership knew that they could not amend out the abortion and bribes in the Senate bill and send it back to the Senate because they knew that it would then fail there.  The only possible way to get their coveted Health bill into Law was to adopt the Senate version in its entirety, un-amended, and send it to the President, where with his signature it would become the law of the land.  No Bill, by the Constitution, can become Law unless it has been ratified by BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark, in its entirety.  How could they do this?  … Well simple … just convince gullible Congressmen, that because of the Republicans and other evildoers, that they must adopt the Senate bill.  The Leadership, sensing fear in the ranks because of public rancor, also ginned up a process of voting rules whereby dubious Congressmen would not have to have their vote made public.  This was done in order to protect them from their constituents’ scrutiny.  After passage, the unwashed Congressmen were told, a “reconciliation bill”, in reality a new Law, would be introduced into the Congress that would remove all the objectionable features of the Law just adopted … a classic … “Trust me.”

There has been such a smoke screen about what is going on that it has been difficult to get a clear look at the picture, but here goes:

• The House bill is too objectionable for the Senate to pass.
• The Senate bill is a slap in the face of many members of the House.
• The Republicans, rightly, object to the whole process as being Socialized Medicine.
• The President has lied about it, saying that it will not raise taxes and he will not tolerate pork, which it has, among many other things.
• The Legislation is so complex that no one … no one can explain it.
• The public is dead set against it.

It should be apparent that the “reconciliation” is impossible, for the Senate will not support it, nor will the House and certainly not the Republicans who, with the new Senator from Massachusetts, can now sustain a filibuster.  And if the Bill in some altered form should clear Congress under some compromise, you can bet that the President would veto it.  There will be no reconciliation.

So what happens?  The anti-abortionists, disingenuously I believe, will say that they opposed it in the House bill, but were forced to pass the Senate version in order to “save health care for the poor.”  The Senate Democrats got what they wanted all along.  The debate, which would have failed to a filibuster, will have been circumvented.  And the President will say that he had to break “a few minor promises” in order to “save health care for the poor.”

And what will the American public have?

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE !!!!!  (Now and forever more)

Can this condition be remedied?

One would like to believe that an incensed public could vote the SOBs out and with a new Congress, withdraw the Law.  This thought is nice, but unrealistic.  The Congress could pass the Law (if it could get past the Democrat filibuster in the Senate), but President Obama would veto it … not a pretty scenario.

The most appealing thing that could happen would be for the Supreme Court to overturn the whole Law.  The entire process of passing this Bill has been questionable Constitutionally.  Many of the tenets of the Bill, such as personal mandates to buy insurance, are un-constitutional.  It is a terrible stretch of the “interstate commerce clause” to find authority for the Federal government to enact this Law.  It is an absolute cinch that the Law will be challenged.

And finally, as pointed out in my article in “Solving It” (Another Convention?), the States can first refuse to enforce the Law, secondly refuse to let it be enforced and thirdly, failing in the first two instances, amend the Constitution to right the wrongs imposed by the Congress … after all, the Congress is the servant of the States.

Or we could have bloody revolution

Or we could just roll over, go belly up, play dead, give up our freedoms and become good little Socialists.