Senate To Vote On Non-Existent Bill After Just Days Of Imagining What's In It

You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Sadly, I'm not even exaggerating:

Harry Reid has a big announcement: Debate will start on Monday on the health care bill! (Assuming Reid gets enough votes to start debate).

Which health care bill? We do not know. Reid has not released the bill. He's keeping it in his rather-large back pocket until he gets what he hopes will be a favorable CBO score.

Why the secrecy?

Why not. It's the way everything has been done in this process. Hold back your cards, then announce that a decision must be made quickly or the sky will fall.

Chicken Little legislative tactics.

Let me be clear: THERE. IS. NO. BILL. Nancy Pelosi only allowed 8 days of debate and discussion before forcing a vote on her 2,000 page bill in the House. Harry Reid is apparently going to force a vote on his version of the bill that still doesn't exist, giving the Senate -- what used to be the most deliberative legislative body in the world -- even less time to simply imagine what's in it. Oh, and by the way, he's still leaving open the possibility of using reconciliation to pass it.

Unreal.

A look at the bill that passed the House reveals loads and loads of racial preferences. Apparently, the Dems think the only people who should wait months for health care are white people.

Nancy Pelosi is calling this abomination a Christmas gift to the American people, but Greg Hengler explains how that works:

...this is like “borrowing” a friend’s credit card, buying a car with it, then presenting them with the car on Christmas morning as their “gift.” Nor is it the first time that a prominent Democrat’s imagined your tax dollars as her personal Christmas club account: Remember Hillary’s disgusting holiday ad during the Democratic primaries? Where do we go to return our “gift,” incidentally?

And even Democrats are starting to acknowledge that this plan will bring us closer to national bankruptcy.

There's a reason that even Gallup is finding that the number of people who want their reps to support ObamaKennedyDeathCare has gone down by 11 points in just the past month.

For an extremely helpful explanation of health care reform terminology, go here.

Former President Clinton had this to say of taking urgent action:

"The worst thing to do is nothing. It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act."

James Antle suggests the opposite:

This mentality is a perfect description of what is wrong with the political class -- the appearance of action always takes precedence over ensuring that the actions being undertaken are wise or just.

Rush Limbaugh plays the expanded quote and calls him out:

CLINTON: The worst thing to do is nothing. One of the things that I think most Americans don't know is that under all versions of this, everybody that already has health insurance not only knows they can't lose it now, but they get to keep their kids on the insurance policy 'til they're 26 years old. There's more for mammograms, more for prostate cancer. There are a whole range of insurance reforms where the benefits flow immediately as we work up toward universal coverage and work out the financing and the costs and all that. It's not important to be perfect here; it's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling, to claim the evident advantages that all these plans agree with.

RUSH: Well, now, in addition to none of that being true, there is a big contradiction here. He says, "We gotta get going. Pass it now. Pass whatever you can. Just pass it." Here, listen to the next bite, and then I'll give you my analysis.

CLINTON: That's up to them to decide. The opposition has already been generated. But if the support gets disenchanted and the turnout goes down and you -- the surveys don't mean anything, puts you at a structural disadvantage. So I think -- I think it is good politics to pass this, and pass it as soon as they can. But I think the most important thing is it is the right thing for America. The worst thing to do is nothing.

RUSH: No, no! In fact, the best thing to do right now would be nothing. Nothing equals stopping this. Stopping this, stopping this equals doing nothing right now. Then we can do our own reforms. We don't need to do this now. But Clinton wants this done now. Just do it, do it -- and every year, add on! Every year, amend it, every year add something else, every year, then you get to universal this and get to universal that, and you get the public option. You gotta do it, gotta do it now. Why? Seems to me Clinton should understand this. Clinton went in there, and he told these Democrats that the only way they're going to keep their seats is if they pass health care. There have been three stages of Clinton. When he lost health care in '93, '94, he blamed on we went to too much, too soon, one big basket.

Then he blamed it on the Republicans in Congress. He blamed it on three different things, but he didn't blame anything on the fact he didn't get it passed. Not once did he say, "The Republicans were elected because I didn't pass health care." The truth is, the Republicans were elected for a host of reasons, among them Bill Clinton tried for health care, used Hillary to do it, and nobody liked her. So now all of a sudden Obama goes up and talks to the Democrats in the House, Clinton goes talks to Democrats in the Senate, and both guys tell the Democrats, "You're going to be worse off if you don't pass this. The only way that you can get reelected is to pass it. We've lost the Republicans. They're ginned up, their opposition to this is clear. You gotta turn out your base. You gotta go out and vote. You gotta pass this."

Now, if this is such a winner, if this is such a winner -- if he is of such a certain mind that health care reform will be the biggest winner for Democrat candidates next year -- why is he telling members of Congress to pass it now? Why not wait 'til next year, close to the elections? It will be fresh in people's minds when they go to the polls. Because this is all predicated on the fact people want this, right? Well, the polls don't say that, polls say most people don't want this. The fringe Democrat base may want it, and the Democrats are going to need their base to turn out and vote for them, but this is a kamikaze party. Bill Clinton's advising these guys to basically go out and throw themselves overboard. He's lying to them. Obama's lying to them.

The fact is that Clinton realizes most people are against it. So the Democrats had better pass it as soon as possible and hope that everybody forgets about it by November 2010. You know, Democrats only gave up on Hillary Care in late September in 1994. Don't forget this. The Democrats frantically tried to distance themselves from the effort in the run-up to the elections but it was too recent. Everybody was still painfully aware what the Democrats had just tried to pull when they went to the polls. By the way, we're supposed to believe that the Clinton-Democrat-media spin that the Democrats only got wiped out in '94 because they didn't pass health care reform? People just aren't that irrational! The Democrats are, but people aren't.

Now they're all in for Obama. "Gotta get this passed! If you don't pass this, you gonna go down in certain defeat." Everybody knew it was the Republicans who had stopped Hillary Care, so why would the voters turn around and reward the very party that had stopped something they wanted so badly? Do you realize the delusional state these people are in, in order to persuade their allies to get this done? If the American people in '94 so wanted health care, why wouldn't they have voted in still more Democrats to make sure it passed the next time around? It's not what happened. They threw Democrats out; Republicans took control of the place for the first time in 40 years. This is revisionism. This is Orwellian, in fact. Orwellian. You know, screw Nostradamus. George Orwell called everything. He called everything. He called Newspeak, he called Big Brother, and he called history revisionism. Statists sat in there and revised history books to take out all the stuff that the statists didn't want in there.

Mm-hmmm...

In the early 1990s, when the Clintons tried to ramrod universal health care through the system, 'Big Pharm' fought hard against it. This time around, they're in the Obama tank...and we now know why.

Remember how Obama and the Dems love to say how many people die every year from that terrible condition known as not having health insurance? It's false. Just thought you should know that.

And where did that $900 billion price tag come from? Obama made it up. No, that is not a joke:

The number sprang from Obama's September speech laying out his own plan on health-care reform. "Add it all up," he said before a joint session of Congress, "and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years." The plan he proposed, however, did not mention the price tag, and the president did not include any specifics about how that price tag was reached....

It was, they hoped, something of a political sweet spot. It calmed some moderates by showing that the White House was willing to push back on the ambitions of more liberal members of Congress and pleased some liberals by showing that the White House wasn't letting the chaos of August distract them from the need for an ambitious bill.

But once that number entered the process, it began guiding the process.

Sound familiar? It should, because that's exactly what they did on the big bailout last year.

Of all the great reasons to be suspicious of this bill is the fact that Congress is exempting themselves from it. And not only are they not forcing themselves to participate in whatever dog they're forcing on us, but they've actively refused to join you and me 11 times:

More than 200 amendments were rejected by the House Rules Committee ahead of Saturday’s vote on the Democrats’ health care bill, including 11 that would have required members of Congress and other government officials to be enrolled in the same federal insurance plan proposed for the American people.

Critics of the health care bill said they offered the 11 amendments – including some that would require the president, vice president, and Supreme Court justices to give up their Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) to enroll in the ‘public option’ or Medicaid – to showcase the problems with the massive legislation.

“If Congress forces our constituents into a public option plan over time, then members of Congress should be expected to do the same,” Rep. Howard McKeon (R-Calif.) told CNSNews.com.

The House Rules Committee attempt was the second time McKeon had tried to amend the Democrats’ health plan to include legislators in the public option.

“Democrats voted down a similar amendment, 21-18, in the Ways and Means Committee during the July markup of HR 3200,” McKeon said. “It became apparent then that Democrats are afraid of being put on a government-run health care program, but that fear does not extend to the welfare of their own constituents.”

The level of suckage in these people is incredible.

But, that's not even the icing on the cake. Under the plan that has already passed in the House, every American will be required to purchase health insurance. Never mind that the actually Constitution protects Americans from precisely this sort of tyranny...Congress knows better than the Founders. So, what happens if someone doesn't want to be forced to buy insurance?

Fines and jail time.

Again, this surreal situation is not a joke:

According to Committee On Ways & Means Republicans Ranking Member, Dave Camp, “the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain acceptable health insurance coverage and who choose not to pay the bills new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.”

Watch this exchange as a reporter actually asks Pelosi about it:

Notice she never really answers the question, and proceeds to run from the podium. I suppose that's natural, since this bill is absolutely inexcusable.

So there you have it. Your health care nightmare, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.

Let's pray the Senate has more sense than this.

There's my two cents.