Scott Spiegel

This week the newly majority Republican House of the 112^th Congress will vote on repeal of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as The Albatross Around Democrats’ Necks.

Republicans have named their bill the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” proving again that Republicans are more likely to give their legislation names that are corny, contentious, and accurate, whereas Democrats are more likely to give their legislation names that are slick, mollifying, and deceptive.

Pundits expect H.R. 2 to easily clear the House, where ObamaCare narrowly passed 219-212 last March, before the great Republican Reckoning of November 2010.  In that election, not only did Democrats lose a net 63 seats to Republicans, but the remaining Democratic flotsam left after the tsunami realized they ought to consider switching their votes unless they wanted to be swept away in November 2012.

In an insightful analysis, The Weekly Standard reported that in swing districts, just 28% of sitting House Democrats who voted for ObamaCare held onto their seats in the 2010 elections.  In contrast, 57% of sitting Democrats in swing districts who voted against ObamaCare kept their seats.

If all House members still in office after November’s election voted the way they did last spring, all newly sworn-in Republicans voted to repeal ObamaCare, and all newly sworn-in Democrats voted not to repeal ObamaCare, the House would vote for repeal by 255-180—a margin more than 10 times as large as the one by which ObamaCare passed.  That’s assuming no newly sworn-in Democrats—none of whom are saddled with a prior vote for ObamaCare, and some of whom campaigned on the promise that they would have opposed it—will vote to repeal it.

Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic leadership have alternately been laughing at and warning against the repeal effort, which they claim is both pathetically useless and grievously dangerous.

Reid announced that Congressional Republicans “have to understand that the health care bill is not going to be repealed…  [They] should get a new lease on life and talk about something else.”  White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs smirked that the repeal effort “is not a serious legislative effort.”

Meanwhile, Obama has insinuated that repeal would be a grave mistake that would send the nation “backward.”  Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius cautioned that repeal could cause 129 million Americans with preexisting conditions to lose their health insurance—a ludicrous claim promptly deconstructed by the Cato Institute.  (New ObamaCare slogan: “If you liked your health insurance, you can’t unkeep it!)

Pelosi plans to march a parade of living-in-their-parents’-basements twentysomething moochers and other sad sacks in front of Congress to talk about the wonders health care reform has already worked for them.  The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel wailed to Ed Schultz on MSNBC, “The Democrats need to tell real-life stories.  They need to bring people into this process and blanket this country with tales of those whose lives have been improved.”

Learning disabled Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee declared that repealing health care is “unconstitutional.”  (Now there’s some irony for you!)

Lee’s brilliant reasoning is that repeal would involve “denying someone their life and liberty without due process.”  She asks, “Can you tell me what’s more unconstitutional than taking away from the people of America their Fifth Amendment rights, their Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the right to equal protection under the law?”  (How about taking away their right to an education that includes a basic understanding of the Constitution?)

Now, even the bill’s authors are admitting that ObamaCare may not reduce costs as planned, and that the government might eventually have to go the way of Massachusetts via price controls and increased taxes, or Tennessee via massive dumping of patients from its rolls.

Yes, it’s true that even after the House repeal bill passes, Reid is likely to refuse to bring H.R. 2 before the Senate, where it probably wouldn’t pass anyway, and certainly wouldn’t clear the 2/3 majority needed to override Obama’s veto.

But Republicans are expected to take over the Senate in droves and bolster their House majority in 2012, at which point they would have enough votes to repeal ObamaCare.  By then, they wouldn’t need 67 votes in the Senate if a Republican president were elected.

In the meantime, House Republicans plan to defund ObamaCare step-by-step via the appropriations process.

Twenty-six states—a majority—are now suing the federal government over the constitutionality of the individual mandate and other ObamaCare provisions.  Democrats previously ridiculed the possibility of challenging ObamaCare in court, but they’re not laughing over that prospect now.

The House vote is the first step on the legislative track toward derailing this heinous legislation.  Congress may not end up being the route by which it is eventually immobilized.  But the momentum to abolish this bill is unstoppable.



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On Monday a Virginia federal district court judge ruled that the primary enforcement mechanism of ObamaCare, the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision—also known as the individual mandate—was unconstitutional.

Justice Henry E. Hudson’s summary judgment did not rule on any other aspect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Obama Justice Department will likely appeal the decision, but the individual mandate is key to making ObamaCare work, since requiring the purchase of health insurance by virtually all U.S. citizens is the only way the rest of the bill can be paid for.  Hudson’s ruling provides ammunition to those who argue that requiring people to purchase a product or service against their will is unconstitutional.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took two primary lines of defense against the Commonwealth of Virginia, whose Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed the suit.

First, she argued that the purchase of health care insurance is an activity that affects interstate commerce, which the Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate per the Commerce Clause and via the Necessary and Proper Clause.  She cited the cases of Wickard v. Filburn, which upheld the government’s ability to regulate farmers’ growing and consumption of wheat on their farms, and Gonzales v. Raich, which upheld the government’s ability to do the same for marijuana for medicinal purposes, as evidence that the government can regulate private individual economic activity due to its effect on interstate commerce.

Sebelius stated that the power to force people to buy health insurance “is well within the traditional bounds of Congress’s Article I power,” by which she meant of course that it’s not remotely within those bounds, but she’d throw in “well” to hedge against any doubt the court may have on that matter.

Hudson tore Sebelius’ argument apart by noting that, for starters, Wickard and Gonzales were widely recognized as being at the very outer limits of interpretation of the Commerce Clause, and that the individual mandate provision goes even further than these cases.  Hudson also pointed out a crucial difference between these two cases and the case of the individual mandate.  Namely, in Wickard and Gonzales, the federal government was regulating private economic decisions citizens had made, including purchasing a plot of land and growing wheat on it, and cultivating marijuana.

The individual mandate, in contrast, would be the first case in U.S. history in which the government was targeting a non-decision or non-action—not purchasing health insurance—as interstate “economic activity” subject to regulation.  As Justice Hudson writes, “Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.”

Second, Sebelius argued that, even if the individual mandate couldn’t be regulated under the Commerce Clause, the Constitution gives the federal government broad power to tax citizens under the General Welfare Clause.  The penalty to be paid for noncompliance with the individual mandate could simply be considered a tax.

Not so fast, wrote Justice Hudson.  Taxes and penalties are different things, and calling a penalty a tax for convenience’s sake doesn’t make it one.  Taxes are used to generate revenue; penalties are used to enforce regulations.

When they were trying to sell their plan to the public, President Obama and Democratic legislators insisted to reporters that the fine was not a tax but a penalty.  An early version of the bill used the word “penalty” to refer to the fine, later versions used the word “tax,” and the final version reverted to “penalty.”  Hudson called the rebranding of the fine as a “tax” a “transparent afterthought.”

There are other revenue-generating mechanisms in the 2,700-page bill that are referred to as taxes, such as the tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans, so clearly the bill’s authors meant for there to be a distinction between its taxes and its penalties.  Finally, Hudson notes that the purpose of the fine couldn’t be primarily to generate revenue, because if the enforcement mechanism worked perfectly, the revenue collected from the fine would be zero dollars.

So kudos to Justice Hudson for yanking out the linchpin of ObamaCare, without which it cannot properly run and will fall to pieces.  Though two Democratic-appointed federal justices in unrelated lawsuits in Virginia and Michigan have found the bill constitutional, and further rulings on the bills will be handed down from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, this is an important victory in stopping the ObamaCare Express, even if we couldn’t catch it before it left the station.



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What kind of benevolent dictator would declare his love for Britain’s stingy, depressing, complicated, cold and arbitrary National Health Service by describing it as “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous and just”?

That would be Harvard-based pediatrician Donald Berwick, who recently received a recess appointment as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by the benevolent dictator who describes his pessimistic and stale vision for America as “hope and change.”

Recess appointments are an executive procedure used, for better or for worse, when the Senate gives a presidential appointee a difficult time during confirmation hearings—for example, when they filibuster a nominee.  Obama’s appointment of Berwick bears the distinction of having been given without a confirmation hearing having even been scheduled.

It’s as though Obama decided that the very requirement that his nominee appear before a Democratic-controlled Senate constituted an unreasonably difficult hurdle.  This isn’t a recess appointment—it’s a vacation to Bermuda appointment.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Circumventing Senate confirmation to appoint the new Medicare chief is part of the same political willfulness that inflicted ObamaCare on the country despite the objections of most voters.”  CBS News observed, “The debate over Berwick’s recess appointment makes clear what the White House knew all too well—Berwick may not have survived the Senate confirmation process, which would have turned into a proxy debate over health care reform.”

Berwick, who will be put in charge of the health care of 100 million Americans without so much as a public query about his plans in office, has been quoted saying, “I am romantic about the N.H.S.; I love it.”  He has called himself “an American fan” of the system, “distant and starry-eyed.”

In his London speech commemorating the N.H.S.’s 60^th birthday, Berwick delivered such pro-American pronouncements to his audience as “Do not trust market forces to give you the system you need…  I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care.  That is for leaders to do.”

When it comes to Berwick’s affection for health care systems centered around use of death panels, apparently absence makes the heart grow fonder.  After returning home and mooning over the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the operational arm of the N.H.S., Berwick realized that “All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”

That country would be the United States, which has the greatest health care system in the world, and would be a profound source of inspiration for anyone who truly loved medicine.  Berwick’s own place of employment is Harvard Medical School, where you would think there would have been a few medical advances in recent years to set his heart aflutter.

But no—Berwick’s passion is for euthanasia counseling and quality-adjusted life years.

Berwick of course has never had to live under the jurisdiction of the N.H.S.  You might call his affair with the British health care system a long-distance relationship.

Describing the supposed British backlash against American conservatives’ depiction of the N.H.S. during the health care reform debate last summer, the New York Times gushed, “A Twitter campaign, We Love The N.H.S., is still going strong, with supporters sending messages about their own good experiences.”

In fact, said campaign didn’t even last 30 days from its first Tweet to its last, and has attracted a piddly 520 followers internationally.  This is despite such helpful but unheeded administrative prompts as “What do you love about the nhs?” and “Please Retweet: 10,000 supporters visualised.”

Admittedly, the riotously popular N.H.S. does have a Facebook fan page with 3,500 members.  Then again, an ill-worded N.H.S. sign implying that contraception would be facilitated by anal rather than vaginal intercourse has a Facebook fan page with 124,475 members.  So perhaps fan counts are not such a flattering measure of the N.H.S.’s popularity.

Even the New York Times admitted that Brits “complain endlessly about the National Health Service…  They deplore the system’s waiting lists, its regional disparities in treatment, its infection-breeding hospitals and its top-heavy bureaucracy.”  I guess the grass is greener on the other side of the pond!

If Donald Berwick wants to swoon over endless waiting lists, fatally protracted wait times, diminished access to specialized care, craven efforts to shield patients from learning about or acquiring costly life-saving drugs, dismal heart attack and cancer survival rates, depersonalized patient treatment, and centralized bureaucratic decision-making about individual health care options, that’s his prerogative.  But forgive the rest of the U.S. if we aren’t quite as smitten as he is.



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ObamaCare supporters who claim that opposition to the recently passed health care legislation is motivated by hatred of empowered minority group members are right about one thing: those who oppose the bill and want it repealed are in fact motivated by hate.

They hate a lot of things they’ve witnessed over the past year, none having anything to do with African Americans, Latinos, or women wielding power in Washington.

Among other things, they hate:

The health care bill:

•    Its unconstitutional individual mandate and general abridgment of liberty

•    Its ban on non-government-sanctioned health care plans, including catastrophic coverage that many young people prefer, and its usurious taxing of “Cadillac plans”

•    Its boneheaded enforcement mechanism which, in addition to being miswritten, would simply lead people to pay a relatively piddly fine instead of buying health insurance until they needed it

•    Its paying only six years of benefits while levying ten years of taxes and claiming to be a deficit reducer

•    Its stubborn and complete absence of free market reforms, such as malpractice tort reform, removal of the ban on selling insurance across state lines, and health insurance tax credits for the self-employed

•    Its excessive length and complexity, and the insufficient time the public and even Congress has been given to read and understand its various iterations

The way in which the bill was passed:

•    The stipulation of repeated, and repeatedly missed, arbitrary deadlines for holding this or that vote, including the infamous Christmas Eve session, for no reason other than political expediency for Democrats

•    The abuse of the Congressional Budget Office’s authority, whereby Democrats fed the CBO misleading parameters, then bragged to the public that the bill saves money, based on the evidence that the CBO was forced to say so, according to the Democrats’ rules of the game

•    The shady deals made to bribe reluctant Congressional Democrats to support the bill

•    The use of a phony, unenforceable, last-minute executive order banning federal funding of abortions, which contradicts the text of the bill, in order to get the last few votes needed for passage in the House

•    The inappropriate use of the budget reconciliation procedure to get the bill over the finish line

Politicians’ willful ignorance of the consequences of socialized medicine elsewhere, including:

•    The horrific rationing of care and substandard service in Britain resulting from regulations enforced by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence

•    The decline in rates of drug and medical device development in countries that nationalize health care, and the frequent use of the U.S. health care system by foreign travelers who can afford it

•    The spiraling costs that follow the addition of a massive entitlement program to a precariously debt-laden economy

Politicians’ refusal to heed the will of the American people:

•    Their shunning the results of polls that for months have shown a majority of Americans opposing the bill, and far more Americans strongly opposing than strongly supporting it

•    Their avoidance of constituents at townhall meetings and their evasion of constituents’ questions

•    Their attempt to obfuscate the public’s understanding of the bill by blurring the definitions of such terms as “tax,” “preexisting condition,” “profit,” and “government-run healthcare”

•    Their insulting the public’s intelligence by claiming that the bill will provide insurance to 32 million more people, yet somehow save money

•    Their disingenuous protestations that they are not looking to expand government control of health care to a single-payer system in the future

•    Their condescending lecturing and patronizing attempts to explain and sell the bill to us thickheaded constituents

•    Their paternalistic insistence that they know better than us what we need, and that we’ll like the bill once we find out what’s in it

The ugly mischaracterization of ObamaCare opponents:

•    As “teabaggers,” a vulgar term never used by any Tea Party patriot

•    As simpleminded, emotional, easily manipulated fear mongers and rabble rousers

•    As racists who supposedly shouted the n-word and spat at black lawmakers marching to Selma—er, to the House vote

Apparently unnoticed by the mainstream media is the fact that numerous, prominent, pasty white males have been instrumental in getting ObamaCare passed, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Vice President Joe Biden, and most of the Democrats in Congress, not to mention the cheerleaders at MSNBC, The New York Times, and every other left-leaning news organization in the country.

Americans are indeed starting to mobilize peaceful armies and reload for another round of the fight against the bill they hate.  But their motivation is not to stigmatize supporters of Obamacare.  It is to stop them.



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History in the making, indeed.  The 100,000 constituents who signed the Senate Conservatives Fund’s Repeal ObamaCare Pledge in the first 48 hours since the House passed Obamacare suggest that historic efforts are about to be made to kill this bill before it can inflict its intended and unintended damage.

Here’s a roadmap of priorities for Obamacare opponents in and out of Washington, to get us from this dispiriting week to January 2013:

1. Challenge the constitutionality of H.R. 3962. Work to invalidate its requirement that all individuals purchase a good or service—in this case, health care—as a condition of being alive, something the federal government has never forced its citizens to do.  Contest the federal government’s ability to unload an unfunded mandate onto states, many of which are experiencing budgetary crises and couldn’t afford a new permanent entitlement even if they wanted one.

2. Encourage states to file lawsuits against the bill. Twelve states have already pledged to do so, including Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, Alabama, North Dakota, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.  H.R. 3962, unlike many other comprehensive bills previously passed by Congress, fortunately contains no severability clause that leaves the remainder of the bill intact if one part is struck down in court.  Thus, getting a court to nullify just one part of this bill would overturn the entire thing.  Take these court challenges all the way to the Supreme Court.

3. Encourage states to pass laws preventing residents from being required to buy insurance. Thirty-eight states are considering passing such legislation, and 33 have already introduced bills.  These 33 states include Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—all large states that went for Obama in 2008, which disproves liberals’ inevitable charge that rebel states are just rural flyover country filled with racist rednecks.  Virginia (another Obama state) is the first state to have passed such legislation, through an effort led by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.  Idaho has also passed legislation protecting its residents from the federal mandate.

4. Encourage states to block enforcement of the bill. Refuse to fund it.  How can states that are millions of dollars in the red pay for a massive new program dumped on them by the Fed?

5. Give Congressmen an earful during their spring Congressional recess. Make last summer’s townhalls look like giddy autograph signings.  Jam Congressmen’s schedules with meetings; pressure Senators not to sign the House’s reconciliation measure; pressure House members not to sign any reconciliation measure revised by the Senate.

6. Challenge the reconciliation process. Get the Senate parliamentarian to rule (correctly) that the House’s Social Security-related provision is inappropriate for inclusion in a reconciliation bill, per the Byrd Rule, and must be removed.

7. Change the reconciliation bill. Force the Senate to make changes to the reconciliation bill before voting on it, so that the House has to vote again on the Senate’s version; then force the House to make changes so the Senate has to vote again; and back and forth.  Strip away enough dissatisfied votes from at least one chamber to prevent the reconciliation measure from being passed, thus letting the ugly Senate bill with its backroom deals and tax on costly union health plans stand intact and paving the way for repeal.

8. Hold up the reconciliation process. Encourage GOP Senators to tie up voting on the reconciliation bill in the Senate by proposing an indefinite number of amendments.  Although debate on a reconciliation bill is limited to 20 hours (about one second per 43,000 citizens affected by the legislation), there are no limitations on the number of amendments that may be proposed.

9. Take over the House, Senate, and Presidency. Vote Democrats out of Congress in 2010 and 2012, and Obama out of office in 2012, and elect conservative Republicans who promise to repeal Obamacare.  Support candidates who campaign on the promise to repeal Obamacare as their first act of the 113th Congress in January 2013.  In the same way that Scott Brown annihilated his opponent in Massachusetts by campaigning on one promise—to vote against the Senate health care bill—all Republican Congressional candidates in November 2010 and 2012 should campaign on the sole promise to repeal Obamacare.  Dozens of Representatives and Senators have already pledged to repeal the bill, as have hundreds of 2010 Congressional candidates, including Senate hopefuls Marco Rubio in Florida, Chuck DeVore in California, Michael Williams in Texas, and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania.

10. Repeal H.R. 3962.

11. Amend the Constitution. If necessary, get three-quarters of the states—perhaps the same 38 considering legislation banning the mandate—to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit the federal mandate, thus invalidating the bill.

12. Encourage noncompliance with the bill as a form of civil disobedience. There may be 17,000 new IRS agents under H.R. 3962, but there are 170,000,000 of us who oppose the bill.

As Paul Ryan said in the House Sunday night: “If this passes, the quest to reclaim the American idea is not over.  The fight to reapply our founding principles is not finished; it’s just a steeper climb.  And it is a climb that we will make.”

Let’s give ourselves a boost on the backs of the complacent and wholly unprepared socialized health care supporters who think the fight is over and they have won.



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This week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to ask Democratic Representatives to demonstrate their unconditional endorsement of the health care reform bill before Congress by—not voting for it.

In a parliamentary trick known as the “Slaughter Solution”—brought to you by Rule Committee Chair Louise Slaughter, who was last seen on TV at the Blair House summit carping about a constituent’s used dentures—the House would not ever have to actually vote for the unpopular Senate bill in order to pass it.  (Weren’t Democrats the ones clamoring for an “up-or-down vote” for the last three months?)

Instead, according to Slaughter, House Democrats could simply vote for a reconciliation package written to remove any unsavory provisions from the Senate bill and bring it more in line with liberal House members’ liking.  The package would contain what’s known as a “hereby” rule declaring that the Senate bill would be “deemed” to have been “already passed” by the House.  The reconciliation package would be sent to the Senate for approval, and then it and the original Senate bill would go to the President for signature.

The only nagging detail in this plan is that Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution states that every bill “shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” before it may go to the President.  In other words, a bill must be passed—not “deemed to have been passed”—by both chambers first.

In case this wasn’t clear, the Founding Fathers reiterated, “[T]he votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the journal of each House respectively.”  (Note: “Yea” in this case does not mean, “Yea, I don’t have to vote for the bill!”)

This little provision was clarified by a 1998 Supreme Court ruling that both chambers must pass identical versions of the bill, thus bestowing their joint approval upon it.  Only minor, budget-related adjustments are permitted through reconciliation.  Conference committees between the two chambers typically meet to work out differences, and then both chambers must vote again on bills with identical wording.

On the off-chance that this still isn’t clear to the Chair of the Rule Committee: Both chambers must vote on the same bill.  One chamber may not pass another bill “deeming” the first bill to be passed and pre-amending it before it is voted on.

In addition to its flagrant violation of the Constitution, Congressional Democrats’ plan involving the Slaughter Rule is based on a flawed reasoning process.  Specifically, House Democrats seem to believe that because the Senate has the upper hand, the House may do to the Senate bill whatever they want in order to appease their constituents.  In the House’s view, the Senate has had their turn with the bill—now it’s the House’s chance to have a go at it.

It is true that most of the 59 Democrats in the Senate who voted for Obamacare would probably accept almost any version of the bill that could pass the House at this point, rather than see a year of effort, their plans for health care reform, and Obama’s presidency go down the drain.

But there’s a fundamental tactical reason that one chamber of Congress is not allowed to proceed according to the Slaughter Solution.

Namely: what if Senate Democrats vehemently opposed the House’s preferred version of the bill?  What right would House Democrats have to trample on the Senate’s bill and unicamerally morph it into one of their own choosing?

What if passing the reconciliation bill required, for example, offering a series of bribes to House members that made the Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase look like chump change—a tactic Obama has already signaled he is open to, and one that seems necessary to seal the deal?

Suppose the House inserts objectionable sweetheart deals for the states of representatives who are wavering on the bill.  Then Democrats are right back where they started after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, with one chamber being badgered to approve the other chamber’s distasteful version of the bill without having substantive say over its content.

The Slaughter Solution, in addition to being unconstitutional, anarchic, and embarrassingly and transparently desperate, sets an ugly precedent, whereby one chamber of Congress may steamroll the other with impunity, widen the historic trust gap between the chambers, and pass radical legislation that both chambers have not fundamentally agreed upon.

The Slaughter Solution has been referred to as a “self-executing” rule.  Based on the initial reaction of voters to this ruse, Representatives who vote for it may find that this adjective soon comes to describe their careers in Congress.

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“This president is a real slow learner.” – Oscar Goodman, Mayor of Las Vegas

Speaking of gambling, President Obama has subpoenaed weary Democrats and disgusted Republicans to a Blair House summit tomorrow for a day-long policy-palooza to be broadcast on C-SPAN for Americans who didn’t get enough of the health care reform debate last year.  Obama has decided to wager what little respectability he has left on the hope that the American people will be charmed by his vision of health care reform, will develop amnesia, and will forget everything they hate about the bills passed by Congress last year.

The Associated Press announces that the new proposal released by the President “is important, but not as critical as the political skill Obama can apply to an impasse that seems close to hopeless in a pivotal congressional election year.”

Hmm…  Let’s tally up the campaigns Obama has fought and lost using his “political skill” over the past four months: securing the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, electing Creigh Deeds governor of Virginia, reelecting John Corzine governor of New Jersey, getting UN members to agree to a climate change accord in Copenhagen, and electing Martha Coakley Senator in Massachusetts.  And of course his year-long crusade to sell Congress’s health care plan to the public, which resulted in voters increasing their opposition to the plan in direct proportion to the number of syllables Obama emitted in his attempts to explain it.

Obama views the populace as a huddled mass of slow learners to whom he must explicate Congress’s monstrous health care legislation over and over until it penetrates their thick skulls.

In fact, it is Obama who is the slow learner.  Americans have learned about the bill, debated the bill, and rejected the bill; implicitly and explicitly, at townhall meetings and in polls and at the ballot box; over and over, for a year.

But Obama promises us he has a new proposal that incorporates the best of the House and Senate bills.  The White House posted Obama’s proposal online Monday morning to allow the public to see what bold, fresh ideas the President has to offer.

The verdict: Obama might as well have taken the Senate version of the health care bill and stuck Groucho Marx glasses, nose, and mustache on it.

Obama has been trying to entice Republican lawmakers to attend the summit by boasting that there are “Republican elements” in his proposal—by which he means that there are Democratic elements in it that a few liberal Republicans have been caught on tape saying might be tolerable, if dealt with in isolation, if massively reworked from their present form, and if included only in conjunction with real free-market reforms.

Even AP admits that Obama has nothing new to offer: “Realistically, he’s just hoping to win a big enough slice to silence the talk of a failing presidency.”

Obama’s one significant innovation is increasing the federal government’s power to regulate insurance premiums: “[H]ealth insurers must submit their proposed premium increases to the State authority or Secretary for review…  [I]f a rate increase is unreasonable and unjustified, health insurers must lower premiums, provide rebates, or take other actions to make premiums affordable.  A new Health Insurance Rate Authority will be created to provide needed oversight at the Federal level.”

So Obama proposes to improve on a massive, bloated bill that explodes government intervention in the private sector and is hated for that very reason by… adding more government intervention.  Sounds like a winner!

Even Democrats aren’t on board with the ideas in this proposal, at least to the degree that they were when the House and Senate passed their versions of the legislation last year.  Congressmen up for reelection this fall received the message sent by Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts loud and clear.  The only federal officials who still want to ram this thing through are Obama, Senators not up for reelection, Senators up for reelection who know they’re going to lose, and Representatives from insanely liberal districts that will boot them if they don’t vote for the bill.

And even Democrats don’t really believe anything will come of Thursday’s meeting.  Every time the media asks Democratic Congressional leaders about their goals for the Blair House summit, they respond with the same bromides about how they believe Thursday’s meeting will help “provide affordable, accessible, quality health care to all Americans.”  How, specifically, will it do that?  Specifically?

If anything is to be passed, it will have to be through budget reconciliation—and many commentators say Democrats don’t even have enough votes for that anymore.

The Chicago Tribune recently called the House and Senate legislation “zombie” bills, noting that neither chamber likes the other’s version, the public hates both, and the only reason the bills are still wandering around is that Congressional leaders are hinting that they will try to merge them through reconciliation.  The Tribune condemns reconciliation as “convoluted.  Confusing.  And unnecessary.  The Democrats need to reconcile themselves to what Americans are telling them about these health care bills: They’re too complicated and too expensive.”

Obama isn’t the only slow learner in Washington.

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Yesterday Democrats suffered a mortifying trouncing in Massachusetts’ special Senate election, in which Republican Scott Brown zoomed from 17 points behind Democrat Martha Coakley in the polls less than two weeks ago to winning by a handy 5%.

As AP reported, “Brown’s victory was so sweeping, he even won in the Cape Cod community where Kennedy, the longtime liberal icon, died of brain cancer last August.”

To be fair, Coakley did manage to capture 84% of Cambridge, Amherst, and Provincetown, which tend to serve as bellwethers for—well, themselves.

Coakley’s complaint that her poll numbers started to drop right after the Senate passed its version of the health care bill on Christmas rang a bit hollow, given that she campaigned vociferously to vote for that very health care bill if elected to Congress.

In the wake of the clear message sent to them by the people of Massachusetts, Democrats are slowly backing away from their suicidal insistence on passing a bill only 33% of Americans favor, considering more bipartisan/free-market solutions, and resolving to address healthcare reform in a more piecemeal fashion.

Gotcha!  Actually, Democrats are considering a number of insane, Mission Impossible-style workaround strategies to thwart the will of the people and pass their health care bill without a filibuster-proof Senate.  These include:

•    Forcing the House to pass the Senate bill, word-for-word, with nary a change in punctuation.  This option would throw out all of the heatedly negotiated agreements between the two chambers conducted in the past few weeks, including the major union employee exemption to the excise tax on “Cadillac plans.”  It would also ignore many of the other differences between the bills for which Democrats in the House say they cannot accept the House version as is, such as language on abortion funding.  House Democrat Bart Stupak, author of the Stupak Amendment, reported on Monday that “House members will not vote for the Senate bill.  There’s no interest in that.”  He added that when the notion was proposed at a caucus meeting among Democrats, “It went over like a lead balloon.”

•    Tricking the House into passing the Senate bill and promising them that it will be morphed into a bill more to their liking “later.”

•    Using the byzantine budget reconciliation process to ram the bill through.  This would subject weary Americans to several more months of reports of Democrats using sneaky, behind-closed-doors, parliamentary procedures no one understands to get their way—a surefire Democratic victory strategy for the midterm elections in November.

If these tactics don’t work, it is conceivable that Democrats may try any of the following makeshift schemes (I hate to give them any ideas, but it’s probably best that we be forewarned):

•    Abolishing the filibuster.  Democrats would of course reinstate the filibuster in time for the November elections, when they will lose one or both chambers of Congress and will need it as protection against devious, heavy-handed Republicans.

•    Concocting some fake scandal involving Scott Brown, or another Republican from a state with a Democratic governor, that forces him to resign, thus allowing the governor of said state to appoint a Democratic replacement Senator.

•    Crowning Olympia Snowe Queen of the Senate and letting her rewrite the bill to her specifications, including funding for her own blueberry farm and stock options in L.L. Bean.

•    “Packing the Senate” à la FDR’s court-packing scheme in the 1930s.

•    Kidnapping Republican legislators and replacing them with genetically engineered Manchurian candidate clones who have been brainwashed to vote for the bill.

Think these scenarios are outlandish?  Democrats have demonstrated that, as House Minority Leader John Boehner noted, “They are going to try every way, shape, and form to shove this bill down the throats of the American people.”

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi commented that the special Senate election is not a referendum on the health care bill, because—get this—Massachusetts already has universal coverage.  She elaborated, “Massachusetts has health care.  The rest of the country would like to have that too.  So we don’t say a state that already has health care should determine whether the rest of the country should.”  No, I think a state that has already suffered its own version of Obamacare is trying to do us all a favor by warning us about what a nightmare it would be.

Democrats have made it through the town hall gauntlet, they’ve cheated death in squeakers of votes in both chambers, they’ve gone on record in the past 48 hours insisting that they will get health care reform “one way or another” and that “health care will pass no matter what.”  Why should they stop now?

I have one more suggestion for Democrats, which they are less likely to consider than any of the ideas above, including the kidnapping plot, but which might just save some of their skins.

Listen to the American people and kill the damn bill.

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Supporters of the Democrats’ health care bill offer the following take on Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha “Kennedy” Coakley, a plea they hope will draw on voters’ sense of fairness and magnanimity:

If Brown wins, the health care bill will not be passed.  It is a terrible shame that something this nation has frittered away a year debating and Congress has spent a year drafting, something that may not get another chance again—if at all—for a whole generation, could be dismantled because of the obstinacy of one man who wins a special election in a tiny state.  Brown may even derail Obama’s entire agenda.

As if it will do any good, here’s a point-by-point rebuttal of this selfless appeal by Democrats to our leftist instincts:

(1) The point of a debate is to have two sides present their cases and see which makes the better argument.  The outcome is not predetermined, much as Democrats would like it to be and have tried to make it so.  Republicans spoke, Democrats spoke, and the American people made up their minds: Republicans won.

(2) The fact that we spent a year debating this horrendous bill, in all its myriad forms, is indeed deplorable, when we could have been talking about how to encourage the Iranian protestors, win in Afghanistan, or abolish the Department of Education.  But just because gallons of ink have been spilled and billions of megabytes have been transmitted and trillions of cubic feet of C02 have been exhaled thrashing out numerous claims made by Democrats and debunked by Republicans, doesn’t mean we have to embrace the fallacy of sunken costs and pass something that stinks just to rationalize our squandered effort.

Making a $100 down payment on a $1,000 dishwasher offered by a fraudulent mail-order company that folds does not obligate us to send the company the other $900 so our first $100 isn’t wasted.  If any Democrats want to silently change their positions on the bill and pretend they felt that way all along, I promise you that Republicans will be tactful enough to go along with the charade.

(3) If it isn’t right to pass this legislation in the current generation, just as it wasn’t right to pass it in Hillary Clinton’s generation, or Truman’s generation, or FDR’s generation, then we can afford to wait at least another generation to debate it again, if liberals really insist on holding and losing this contest once more.

(4) Saying that the special election in Massachusetts could destroy the whole health care plan is like saying that the failure of an asteroid to demolish the court building where Bernard Madoff was sentenced destroyed his chance for freedom.  The success of this health care bill has been dangling like an anvil from a spider web since last summer.  The special election in Massachusetts is only the latest in many gusts of wind to threaten to crash the Democrats’ hopes to the ground.

(5) Saying that the travesty of Democrats’ health care bill not passing is due to Scott Brown’s stubbornness upon being elected is like saying that the travesty of Confederate soldiers’ dying is due to Abraham Lincoln’s stubbornness upon being elected.  In addition to its being the right course of action, if Brown wins and votes no on the bill, it will be because he was explicitly elected for that purpose alone, to take that specific action by itself.  Indeed, he barely had to say a word about any of the other issues in order to win fanatical political and financial support from Republicans, Independents, and Democrats in Massachusetts and across the country.

Promising to kill the health care bill is not just the biggest, but the only functional plank in Brown’s platform.  Senator Brown could turn around next month and introduce a bill using Medicare funds to subsidize partial-birth abortions for illegal Islamist immigrant tax cheats with Al-Qaeda ties, and he would still be Republicans’ hero for having voted down the health care bill.

(6) If Obama isn’t buried under a pile of political debris after his dustup with the 41st Senator, and dares to try to foist cap-and-trade, Stimulus II, or other reckless spending debacles onto a battered and bruised Congress, he will find it even harder to pass such legislation than he did the health care bill, and that is saying something.  Indeed, one of the fringe benefits of voting for Brown is that he will block not only the health care bill but anything like it that comes down the chute.

As an opponent of the health care bill, here’s my take on Tuesday’s election, which I hope will appeal to any remaining connection to reality liberals may have:

Even if Brown loses, the health care bill still will not be passed.  There are too many gaping discrepancies between the two versions of the bill to be reconciled; Blue Dog Democrats are too nervous about their own reelection campaigns this fall; and soon-to-be-elected Republican majorities in the House and Senate will do everything in their power to reverse any steps taken to enact this wretched bill.

They may even derail Obama’s entire agenda.

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Each of the two ratified versions of the health care bill currently waiting in Congress was barely passed, by virtually the slimmest margin possible, in a hectic last-minute stampede.  Dozens of harsh compromises had to be hammered out to cobble together the fragile framework now standing in each chamber.

The two bills are like delicate Jenga towers, swaying nerve-wrackingly in the breeze, that must now be reassembled by a team of 535 clumsy attention-seekers into a tower twice as tall.  But legislators across the two chambers—and even within them—are not even speaking the same language.

Here are a few of the myriad discrepancies legislators must reconcile to ensure that their monument to Obama’s greatness doesn’t fall:

In the House version of the bill, a government-run insurance exchange is created on a national level and includes a public option.  In the Senate version, exchanges are created on the state level and do not include a public option.  Virtually identical!

The House completely bans the practice 0f charging those with preexisting conditions higher premiums.  The Senate allows insurers to offer unlimited discounts for customers who engage in subjectively defined wellness activities: say, exercising, eating healthy, “not having contracted lung cancer”…

Insurance exchanges are implemented in 2013 in the House bill and 2014 in the Senate bill.

In the House version, employers are forced to provide insurance for their employees and pay a fine if they do not.  In the Senate version, employers are not required to provide insurance, but pay a fine for employees who opt for government-run insurance and receive federal subsidies.  The House has higher penalties than the Senate.

The House version funds the bill by imposing a surtax on families making over $1 million a year.  The Senate version establishes a tax on those with “Cadillac” plans, which includes not only many union members, but millions of families who will unexpectedly find themselves unlucky Cadillac owners over the next 10 years due to the non-inflation-adjusted nature of the provision.

The House version does not tax insurance offered by employers; the Senate version taxes employer insurance above a threshold.

The House version charges older people a maximum of twice the premiums as younger people; the Senate version sets a maximum ratio of three-to-one.  The House offers fewer insurance subsidies for the middle class than does the Senate.  The Senate offers weaker measures to limit out-of-pocket costs than does the House.

The House bill covers 5 million more people than the Senate bill by expanding Medicaid to those earning up to about $2,000 more than in the Senate bill.

The Senate version gives $100 million to Nebraska for indefinite coverage of all new Medicaid enrollees in the state (to buy Ben Nelson’s vote).  The Senate bill gives $300 million to Louisiana for Medicare increases (for Mary Landrieu’s vote); $10 billion to Vermont for new public health centers (for Bernie Sanders’ vote); billions to Nebraska and Michigan to waive nonprofit insurers’ excise taxes (for Ben Nelson and Carl Levin’s votes); millions to Massachusetts and Vermont for Medicaid; and millions to Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania for Medicare Advantage.  None of these provisions is in the House bill.

The Senate version includes, per the insistence of construction unions, an important exception to the employer mandate.  As an article in the New York Times titled “In Health Bill for Everyone, Provisions for a Few” reports, “Under the Senate bill, businesses with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt from the penalties in every industry but construction.”  In the construction industry, the mandate holds for employers with as few as 5 employees.  The House includes no such provision.

Restrictions on abortion funding are tight in the House, with no federal funding allowed; and loose in the Senate, with mere separation of federal and private money, and states allowed to make up whatever rules they want regarding abortion funding.

Coverage for illegal immigrants is not disallowed in the House; it is explicitly banned in the Senate.

It should be sobering for Democrats to realize that if just one Senator or two Representatives decide they can’t tolerate the alternative version of even one of these provisions, that will be enough to topple the whole health care reform edifice.

It’s no wonder, then, that Congressional Democrats now plan to merge the bills behind closed doors, shutting out all Republicans from discussion of the reconciliation process and preventing them from using parliamentary procedures to slow consideration of the bill and allow the public to digest the proposed changes.  Talking Points Memo cites one Democratic House aide who proudly admits, “This process cuts out the Republicans.”  The House will simply take the Senate’s bill, amend it, vote on it, and send it to the Senate; who will then amend the bill, vote on it, and send it to the House; and back and forth until some hideous, lopsided, structurally unsound blueprint garners enough votes in both chambers.

If Democrats had to merge these two bills in a public conference committee—never mind on C-SPAN, as previously promised and recently offered by the network’s CEO—it would take about five minutes for the cacophonous clatter surrounding their health care Tower of Babel to bring it crashing down.

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