Scott Spiegel

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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President Obama has invited Sergeant James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to the White House for a beer to clear up hard feelings over Crowley’s arrest of Gates for disorderly conduct two weeks ago.

Notice how, now that the facts have come out, no one is taking Gates’ side anymore; those who initially sided with Gates are arguing that both men are at fault and that we should all “learn from this incident” and move on.

If anyone still cares, the fact is that both sides are simply not at fault.

Here are a few myths about Crowley’s arrest of Gates:

Crowley overreacted in arresting Gates.

Not according to the Cambridge Police Department; the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association; the Massachusetts Municipal Police Coalition; the Cambridge Multicultural Police Association; mixed-race police unions across the country; Sgt. Leon Lashley, the black cop who accompanied Crowley; or black public figures such as Bill Cosby and Juan Williams.  Other than that, the experts are unanimous—he overreacted!

Gates’ behavior was not an arrestable offense; Crowley should have walked away after establishing his identity.

According to police protocol in such an incident, you leave the scene only once all actors are quiet and issues have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.  You do not slip away while one party is still unhinged, screaming like a lunatic, insulting a police officer’s mother, badgering officers, and frightening neighbors who have gathered out of concern.  If the object of investigation shows no signs of calming down, it is not police procedure to leave such a raving maniac poised to cause additional mayhem.  The police have seen too many cases in which angry residents have gone on to cause further trouble; it’s foolish for anyone to second-guess the Cambridge cops and pronounce that they should have known what Gates would do next.  Gates had dozens of opportunities to cooperate with Crowley’s attempts to defuse the situation and back away, and every time he chose not to.  That is why he was arrested.

As a public servant, Crowley should have been more respectful of Gates.

Gates’ wealthy Harvard neighborhood had experienced a rash of break-ins in recent months, including Gates’ own home.  The job of a public servant in Sgt. Crowley’s position is to forcefully protect property owners—once they are definitively identified as such, which Gates made difficult to accomplish—from those who would aggress against them and their property.  That is what Crowley was trying to do.  Had Gates lived in a poor neighborhood and the two men trying to break in been real burglars, and had Crowley let the men get away without proving they lived there, his department would no doubt have been faulted for ignoring “black-on-black crime.”

Crowley arrested Gates for “disrespecting” him.

Crowley did not arrest Gates because Gates “dissed” him—he acted lawfully in response to Gates’ disorderly conduct, which involved Gates’ following Crowley to the porch, yelling epithets about Crowley’s mother, and startling pedestrians.

Crowley engaged in “racial profiling.”

Ignoring the fact that “racial profiling” does not, by definition, take place when an officer has been called to a resident’s home to investigate a burglary, there’s far more evidence that Gates is guilty of “class profiling”—singling out a working-class cop for abuse because he thought Crowley wasn’t powerful or confident enough to stand up to him.

Both men are prejudiced toward those from different backgrounds.

I can’t say how Gates feels about working-class cops, but Crowley had been hand-selected by a black police commissioner to teach a course on avoiding racial profiling, which he has done for the past five years.  I think that gives him just a smidgen of credibility in claiming he does not go around engaging in egregious on-the-job racial discrimination.

It’s Crowley’s word against Gates’.

Not having been there myself, I’ll nonetheless trust the judgment of a universally praised sergeant who taught an anti-racial profiling class for five years; the black sergeant who accompanied him in the arrest; the Harvard University Police officers who appeared as backup and witnessed the scene; the Police Department who trained Crowley and tracked his implementation of protocol; and Emergency Communications and 911 Center staff who received updates on the incident in real-time.  All of those parties support Crowley.

The police dropped the charges against Gates because their case was weak.

The prosecutor’s office, not the Cambridge Police Department, decided to drop the charges, most likely because of Gates’ status in the community and because he raised such a stink about it.  The Cambridge Police Commissioner has since publicly stated that he wishes the charges had not been dropped and Gates were forced to defend his actions in court under a strict examination of evidence.

Obama should have criticized both men for their behavior.

Obama should have refrained from making a summary judgment on a local case until he knew the facts.  He is President now, not a rabble-rousing community activist “promoting awareness” of social ills.

Crowley reports to the mayor of Cambridge, the governor of Massachusetts, and the President of the United States, and should have accepted their criticism without question.

Crowley was backed up by his superiors and his department.  He does not report directly to the mayor, the governor, or the President, and he is not contractually prohibited from speaking up and defending himself against spurious allegations by citizens he is protecting.

In any event, it appears that Crowley was big enough to agree to meet Gates and Obama at the White House.  In the meantime, he can look forward to the audiotapes of the arrest being released and clearing his reputation.