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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In their quest to pass health care reform legislation, Democrats have been cheating death, robbing Peter to pay Paul, taking candy from babies, lying through their teeth, moving the goalposts, and burning the candle at both ends.  It is all about to catch up with them.

If I were an editorial cartoonist, I’d depict Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as Tarzan and Jane, swinging through the forest, dangling a ragtag bundle of Congressional Democrats in a net trap, eking their way from one tree to the next as each vine snaps behind them, nearly sending them to their death in the jaws of lions below.

Here are a few of the nine lives Congressional Democrats have used up in recent months:

(1)    The House version of the health care bill passed in a squeaker of a vote, 220-215, three weeks ago.  Two Democrats voting the other way would have killed the bill (not 3, since Republican Representative Joseph Cao cast his vote for the bill only once he was sure it would pass without him).

(2)    The Senate agreed to begin debate on its version of the bill in another squeaker of a vote this weekend, which was preceded by a $300,000,000 payoff to Senator Landrieu for her state of Louisiana (thanks for the revised figure, Mary!).  As Dana Milbank noted, this sum is 20 times the price of the original Louisiana Purchase, which bought us 14 states.  As The New York Post observed, based on Louisiana Representative William Jefferson’s recent 13-year sentence for accepting a $100,000 bribe, Landrieu should spend the next 39,000 years in jail.

(3)    Pelosi violated her pledge to post the final version of any legislation online for 72 hours.  Instead, she and Reid have been finishing their handiwork on Friday night and ramming through their votes on Saturday night.  Defeating these bills would be hard enough if the public had time to digest them and hold politicians accountable for supporting them, but now congressmen can claim that they were unaware of ornery provisions slipped in at the last minute, because they were unable to speed-read 300 pages of legalese an hour.

(4)    Leaders of both houses have been inserting, modifying, watering down, or removing passages to get approval for the bill or beginning debate, when they know full well that crucial blocs of defectors will never vote for current legislation in the final vote.  These holdouts will demand that all changes be unmade, which will cause even larger chunks of the Democrats’ fragile majorities to drift away.  For example, Pelosi banned federal funding of abortion in the House bill, a restriction that a dozen representatives will never accept in the final bill.  Reid reinserted in the Senate bill a public option, which had been absent from all committee versions, when he knows that every Republican and at least four Democrats would filibuster a vote on such a bill.

(5)    Reid bought holdout votes from centrist Democrats by making minor concessions tailored to their districts’ concerns.  To support the final bill, these and other Democrats are demanding much bigger concessions, which conflict with each other and with demands made by those in the House.  It is not physically possible to satisfy all of these lawmakers’ requirements at once, which is why Reid and Pelosi have barely been able to do it with 12 different versions of the bill over a period of several months.

(6)    Democrats are willing to slash funding for Medicare, which Jay Cost calls “the most significant fiscal policy ‘achievement’ of the Democratic Party in the last seventy years” [scare quotes mine].  Doing so has cost them the support of seniors, who oppose the bill even more comprehensively than the general public.

(7)    Rasmussen reported on Monday that support for the bill has fallen to a new low of 38%.  Some Senators have been jeopardizing their reelection in 2010 by their support for their bill, and at least one—junior Senator Michael Bennet—has been bragging about it.

(8)    Senator Chuck Schumer is now resorting to bald-faced threats, which should go over wonderfully with the public; recently he declared on behalf of all of Congress, “We’re not going to not pass a bill.”

All of this is already starting to take its toll on Democrats: witness the retreat of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, who voted not to allow debate on Reid’s bill to proceed, when formerly she had been trumpeted as giving the bill a bipartisan veneer by supporting the Senate Finance Committee’s version.  Democrats think they can pass a bill by tossing concessions left and right to keep the ball rolling through each stage, but their momentum is eventually going to grind to a halt.

On a more general note, anyone trying to do something impossible—in this case, have government take over a sixth of the economy and provide better, more widespread care at lower costs than the private sector, with no sacrifices required from anyone—necessarily fights a harder battle than his opponents, because reality is not on his side.  Republicans, as ineffective and mealy-mouthed as some of them have been in making the case against Congress’s bill, possess the inherent advantage of the truth.  The American people and a vigilant alternative media can discover the truth if no one else will.

Congressional Democrats up for reelection next year for one of 535 seats are about to experience a whole new type of rationing.

The pile of victims President Obama has thrown under the bus in his attempts to get health care reform passed is growing so large that just treating their internal injuries is going to bankrupt the national health care system.

First it was the insurance companies.  When Obama realized early on that Americans weren’t chomping at the bit for socialized medicine, he subtly changed his language to imply that he was merely seeking “health insurance reform.”  Insurance companies, to remind Obama, by definition have a vested interest in not covering costly treatments for people with a 100% risk of having a particular medical condition.  But the administration nobly promised to go after, as the New York Times put it, “unpopular insurance industry practices, like refusing patients with pre-existing conditions”—also known as “providing insurance.”

Nancy Pelosi swore to oppose the “shock and awe, carpet-bombing by the health insurance industry to perpetuate the status quo”—as opposed to the couple, two-three homemade signs proffered by paid armies for Health Care for America Now, Organizing for America, SEIU, and ACORN.  Obama promised to “reform the insurance companies so they can’t take advantage of you.”  Pelosi slandered insurance companies as “villains.”

Surprisingly, insurance executives didn’t take kindly to being called monsters.  Karen Ignagni, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, seethed, “Attacking our community will not help get anyone covered…  We have to… correct the record.”

Next it was the pharmaceutical industry: in June, Obama twisted drug companies’ arms into forking over $80 billion toward health care reform, on the condition that the government would not bargain for reduced drug prices for Medicare or mandate price rebates.  Industry lobbyists, just to make sure they weren’t going to be stabbed in the back like the insurance companies, wrote the White House and secured confirmation from White House officials that these promises would be kept.

Congressional Democrats heard about these communications and had a fit.  The administration subsequently claimed that no such conditions had ever been discussed.  One of the House versions of the bill emerged containing provisions mandating both government drug price negotiations and additional price rebates.

Obama then started sacrificing groups less directly involved in health care but assumed to be shoo-in supporters of his agenda.  First he falsely claimed that AARP had endorsed Congress’s health care legislation: “We have the AARP on board” and “AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare.”  AARP’s terse response: “Indications that we have endorsed any of the major health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress are inaccurate.”

Then Obama tossed 760,000 U.S. Post Office employees in the street when he argued that private health insurers wouldn’t be threatened by a public option: “If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine.  It’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

The President of the National Association of Postal Supervisors responded to this charming occupational morale booster by sending Obama a letter asking him to rescind his comments: “On behalf of the 35,000 members of our association, I am writing to express our collective disappointment that you chose to use the Postal Service as a scapegoat…  [Y]our negative references to the Postal Services without knowledge of the facts was a disservice… to all postal employees…  [I]t was a kick to the chest to have you take a shot at a group of federal employees who are working hard every day to support this country…  [W]e would like to be treated fairly and not have our current situation misrepresented, especially by the Commander-in-Chief.”

Such Obama tactics recall his disastrous health care forum last month, in which he planted a question about Cambridge Police Department Sergeant James Crowley’s arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which gave Obama the chance to change the subject and denigrate blue-collar Massachusetts police officers who support him.  As department member Sergeant Kelly King stated after Obama declared that her department had acted “stupidly”: “It’s unfortunate.  I supported the president.  I voted for him.  I will not again.”

Obama even threw his dead grandmother under the bus—again.  When Sarah Palin charged that proposed legislation would lead to death panels that ration health care and decide which old people are not worth saving, Obama said he had favored his grandmother’s hip operation while she was alive, but could understand how a government panel might have calculated otherwise.

Unlike insurance companies, drug companies, the AARP, the post office, and the police, Obama’s grandmother couldn’t respond to his delightful remarks.  Would Obama have dared use that example if she were alive and in need of the operation?  Why doesn’t he try using it on seniors at townhall meetings who are in need of costly treatments?  “I’d pay for your operation if I were your relative, but I can see how a government panel made up of people you don’t know might feel otherwise.”

The latest Obama special interest group to be Greyhounded is House Democrats.  In June, Obama declared, “Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange… including a public option.”  On Sunday, Obama demurred, “The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform.”  Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius insisted that a public option, which House Democrats heavily favor, is “not the essential element” of the plan.  Why, whatever gave you that idea?  Was it perhaps inclusion of the ambiguous word “must”?

Predictably, House Democrats have not accepted this about-face without a fight.  According to New York Representative Anthony Weiner, “Some of us who have gotten roughed up pretty good at town hall meetings and stuck in there because we believe in this, now kind of feel like we have a tire track on our chest where the bus that rolled over us is.”

Fortunately, House Democrats are the one party in all of this who deserve to be thrown under the bus—which is probably why the administration is already backtracking on their disavowal of the public option.

The speaker was Nancy Pelosi.  The date was January 17, 2006.  The setting was a town hall meeting in San Francisco, captured on video and available at Breitbart TV.  The subject was the Iraq War.  The surgery was Botox.

The authors are Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer.  The date is August 10, 2009.  The setting is an editorial in USA Today.  The subject is protestors at health care townhall meetings.  The surgery is still Botox.

Pelosi passionately spoke of free speech rights and the necessity of hearing all viewpoints: “I say to the President, ‘Mr. President [Bush], if you think that our troops in Iraq are there to fight for democracy, do not destroy it at home by cutting off our freedom of speech.’”

She highlighted the critical, historical role of townhall meetings and the importance of face-to-face confrontations between congressmen and the voters they represent: “Democrats and Republicans… are starting to speak out [about the war].  And you know why?  Because they’re hearing from home.  There’s nothing more articulate, more eloquent to a member of Congress than the voice of his or her own constituent.”

Most importantly, she reminded listeners of the strengths of our uniquely American system of representative democracy, and advised them that there is no higher patriotic calling than standing up for what you believe in: “So I thank all of you who have spoken out for your courage, your point of view, all of it—your advocacy is very American and very important…  So let’s not question each other’s patriotism when we have this very honest debate that our country expects and deserves.”

Her words were reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s defense of criticizing the Iraq War and the administration more generally: “Since when has it been part of American patriotism to keep our mouths shut and not raise questions about what our government is doing? That has always been the tradition of America.”  And who can forget: “I’m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic.  We need to stand up and say we’re Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.”

Pelosi and Hoyer characterize health care townhall protests as “un-American” attacks.  They portray the protestors as enemies, not just of reform, but of our very way of life: “These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid… of differing views…  Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.”

In a related development, the Obama administration asks Americans to send the White House any “fishy” comments or criticisms they hear about the health care bill, and the e-mail addresses of those who send them this information.

When anti-war protestors in the back of the San Francisco auditorium held up signs and loudly chanted, “No more funding the war!” thus drowning out Nancy Pelosi, she gamely replied, “I appreciate that you, as advocates, can say that.  I appreciate that!”  The chair of the event intervened on her behalf and pleaded, “Ladies and gentlemen, please, let’s not dissolve into a shouting match here,” but Pelosi cried, “That’s OK!  That’s OK!”

Later, while in the middle of a sentence, Pelosi noticed a row of Code Pink protestors standing up and holding signs across the front of the stage.  Pelosi jokingly called out, “Hello!”  The chair, getting into the spirit of the thing, jovially observed, “This is the way we know we’re in San Francisco.”  Pelosi laughed heartily and exclaimed, “And we love it!”  The Code Pink protestors beamed.

Soon afterward, a woman in the audience began screaming about some conspiracy theory involving “bulldozing people’s homes.”  Pelosi politely interjected, “Excuse me…” but the woman continued to yell while standing and waving a stack of papers.  While audience members hollered, “Shut up!” Pelosi soothingly reassured the woman, “I understand your anger,” and murmured “Yes… Yes…” as the woman rattled off her points.

Pelosi and Hoyer excoriate health care townhall protestors for their disorderly behavior: “[Their] tactics have included… shout[ing] ‘Just say no!’ [and] drowning out those who wanted to hold a substantive discussion.”

Pelosi inspiringly ended her address, “Let me close with this on the Democrats and how we see ourselves…  When Franklin Roosevelt died—and I draw great inspiration from him, because he was a disruptor.”  She added, “I’m a fan of disruptors,” and pumped her fists up and down as though agitating a crowd.

Pelosi and Hoyer somberly write, “[I]t is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway… to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue.”

Well, that’s clear, then.

Senator Barbara Boxer recently declared that, before the current round of town hall meetings on health care reform, the last time she had seen such suspiciously well-dressed protestors was during the 2000 Florida election recount.  Well, yes—until Obama’s presidency, that’s the last time Republicans showed up en masse to get really angry about something; screaming and chanting are political tactics more naturally suited to the left.

As for the couture angle—here’s a newsflash for Boxer: Republicans have higher standards than Democrats.  A typical left-wing protest involves twenty-somethings and washed-up hippies in ratty T-shirts and shredded jeans breaking windows at a local Starbucks during the midmorning rush.

The average right-wing protest—invariably held in the evening, since attendees have jobs in the daytime—involves adults who dress as though they would like to elevate community standards, not degrade them.  Participants address their concerns directly to those in power, such as legislators, rather than assailing defenseless third parties, such as coffee franchise employees.  The fact that most conservative protestors come directly from work may explain why they wear suits and skirts, but apparently Senate Democrats believe opinions are valid only if expressed by people sporting Birkenstocks and buttons urging presidential assassinations.

When Boxer and other Congressional Democrats realized that Americans don’t view “well-dressed” as an epithet, they moved in the opposite direction: they claimed that the protestors were scruffy rabble-rousers after all.  House Leader Nancy Pelosi insisted that she had seen demonstrators “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.”  Translation: One protestor had a swastika with a slash through it, and others were displaying American flags and ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ banners—you know, symbols like swastikas.

Saddling protestors with the “brownshirt” label didn’t work, so Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina warned Democrats who were planning town hall meetings, “If you get hit… punch back twice as hard.”

Evidently some representatives took this message literally: at a town hall meeting in Ohio, Representative Russ Carnahan hired union organizers to deny entry to citizens who looked as though they might oppose health care reform legislation, several of whom were promptly mauled by union thugs and sent to the hospital.  Outside, black conservative Kenneth Gladney was racially slandered and physically attacked and sent to the emergency room by an unidentified opponent for handing out ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags.  Protestors were also roughed up at a meeting held by Florida Representatives Kathy Castor and Betty Reed.

Naturally, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid’s response to this onslaught of leftist violence and intimidation was… to blame Republicans for not minding their manners.  Reid accused protesters of attempting to “sabotage” the process; he said, “These are nothing more than destructive efforts to interrupt a debate…  They are doing this because they don’t have any better ideas.”

Well, yes, actually, we do have one or two, which you may not have heard, because we’ve only been ranting about them for the past, oh, two decades: malpractice tort reform, Medicare reform, health savings accounts, healthcare tax credits, vouchers for private insurance, and pay for performance.  More generally, competition in the private market for health insurance, and individual autonomy regarding level and type of coverage and risk tolerance.  Other than that, we’re flush out of ideas!

In an effort to quell dissatisfaction among constituents, Democrats in Congress finally decided to listen to town hall participants’ ideas and give thoughtful responses that address their concerns.  Just kidding!  The latest tactics being employed by congressmen across the nation are: (1) showing up at town hall meetings, reciting a few talking points, claiming the crowd is too boisterous when they open their mouths, and leaving; (2) announcing meetings at the last minute in the hope that no one will attend; and (3) holding “virtual” town hall meetings.

For example, Representative Kathy Castor’s spokeswoman defended Castor’s abbreviated appearance in Florida by stating, “We said all along our role was to come and give an update on the bill in Congress…  [T]hat’s what we did.”  And that’s what websites are for.

Michigan Representative John Dingell waited to announce last Thursday’s 6pm town hall meeting until Thursday morning.  Word of mouth spread throughout the day, however, and that evening Dingell faced hundreds of constituents who were not impressed by his deceitful maneuver.

At least Castor and Dingell showed up in person; other congressmen, such as Representative Brian Baird of Washington, are planning virtual meetings with constituents.  According to The Columbian, “If you happen to be sitting near a publicly listed Clark County telephone line on the right day at the right time, your phone will ring…  [T]he exact date and time will be kept secret from the public…  [A]n automated message will ask whether you have a question…  Sitting at his own telephone at an as-yet-undisclosed location, Baird then will choose a name based on its location and the topic…  After the call is over, the recording will be posted on his Web site.”

Baird helpfully notes that this system will allow for “a much better cross-section of the public,” by which he means “a cross-section of the public that is not knowledgeable or concerned enough to attend a town hall meeting.”  Note to Baird: There’s a reason they’re called “town hall meetings,” not “prescreened anonymous secret one-way teleconference recordings.”

In the end, some congressmen have decided to simply give up on their constituents.  New York Representative Tim Bishop chose to suspend town hall meetings in his district until late August—you know, when just everyone will be around—because he concluded there was no point in facing an “unruly mob.”  Senator Claire McCaskill similarly issued a last-minute cancellation of a scheduled event due to “safety” concerns.

In the same way that Democrats denigrate protestors who adhere to a “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” standard, they have sunk to a new low: projecting their party’s historic propensity for mob rule and violent agitprop onto frail, elderly grandparents in bowties and cardigans.