Reid to Republicans: healthcare reform is now law of the land
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proudly proclaimed on Wednesday that the “historic healthcare reform is now no longer a bill it is the law.”
Someone please tell Republicans.
They are planning a flurry of amendments to try to stall a package of changes being considered by the Senate that Democrats want to make to the legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama.
House Democrats demanded the changes, which among other things would close the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap for the elderly.
Republicans want to change the new law too. They want to repeal it. Some of their amendments would do just that. It is unlikely Senate Democrats will reverse course and undo the hard fought victory for Obama.
But other proposed Republican amendments could force Democrats to take politically unpalatable election-year votes on measures such as one that would strike Medicare spending cuts from the bill.
from Afghan Journal:
Engaging the Afghan Taliban: a short history
(The niche that once held a giant Buddha, in Bamiyan. Picture by Omar Sobhani)
For those pushing for high-level political negotiations with the Afghan Taliban to bring to an end to the eight-year war, two U.S. scholars in separate pieces are suggesting a walk through recent history The United States has gone down the path of dialogue with the group before and suffered for it, believing against its own better judgement in the Taliban's promises until it ended up with the September 11, 2001 attacks, says Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute in this article in Commentary.
Rubin, who is completing a history of U.S. engagement with rogue regimes, says unclassified U.S. State Department documents show that America opened talks with the Taliban soon after the group emerged as a powerful force in Kandahar in 1994 and well over a year before they took over Kabul. From then on it was a story of diplomats doing everything possible to remain engaged with the Taliban in the hope it would modify their behaviour, and that they would be persuaded to expel Osama bin Laden who had by then relocated from Sudan. The Taliban, on the other hand, in their meetings with U.S. diplomats, would stonewall on terrorism but would also dangle just enough hope to keep the officials calling and forestall punitive strategies.
Over a five year period of engagement, the United States gained little while the Taliban grew even more radicalised and the threat from al Qaeda more serious. Rubin details how State Department officials were repeatedly misled by Taliban officials harbouring bin Laden even after two U.S. embassies were attacked in Africa in 1998. They even told them they would protect the Buddha statues in Bamiyan which were subsequently destroyed.
"The Taliban had like many rogue regimes, acted in bad faith. They had engaged not to compromise, but to buy time. They had made many promises, but did not keep a single one. The Taliban refused to isolate, let alone, expel Bin Laden , and al Qaeda metastasized," says Rubin. The Sept 11 attacks were plotted at a time when U.S. engagement with the Taliban was in full swing.
Some of the logic and even the language used at the time is eerily similar to the current push for a political settlement with senior Taliban figures. There was a difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban and it was possible that the latter could be peeled away, U.S. officials and political commentators said at the time. Second, Pakistan with its close ties to the Taliban was a key player offering advice to Washington, as it seeks to at the present time.
India needs to accept that Pakistan did the right thing in helping US to throw the communists out of Afghanistan. Communism and socialism are more evil than all the fanatics of the world put together. We also need to accept that the US did the wrong thing in abandoning the Mujahideen fighters once the communists had been defeated.
Any normally moral and grateful country would have granted a life long pension to these honest brave fighters who had gone through a period of lot of personal sacrifices during the 10 year war.
Since the Afghan youth had learnt no other skills than fighting gorilla wars, and they had to do something for a living, they got transformed into the Taliban….
Pakistan of course cheated all the way. First it cheated the US by stealing a lot of supplies meant for the Afghan communist war to instigate insurgency in India, then it cheated by helping the Taliban to take over Afghanistan and now is again cheating by helping the US to fight the Taliban….I doubt if even Pakistan knows whose side it is on any particular day….
Will presidential weight carry healthcare through?
President Barack Obama spoke. Republicans talked back.
No sign that anyone shifted positions after the president’s remarks today in the East Room at the White House with lots of white hospital coats in the audience.
In fact, it appears that the two sides — Obama and the Republicans — hardened their resolve, setting the stage for a political tug-of-war that’s only going to turn more fierce as the November elections near.
Obama wants it, Republicans oppose it. But it’s the congressional Democrats left trying to push through Congress an issue that has created discord within their own ranks. Democrats in the Senate differ from their colleagues in the House on what the legislation should look like — and not all Democrats support it.
Democrat leaders are preparing to try and push the legislation through with a process called reconciliation that would require a simple majority, involve an umpire, and leave Republicans steaming.
Obama said as much in his speech without actually using the R word: “And now it deserves the same kind of up or down vote that was cast on welfare reform, that was cast on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, that was used for COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and, by the way, for both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.”
Republicans responded by using the election scare tactic aimed at Democrats worrying about losing seats in November — “Every election in America this fall will be a referendum on this issue,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said.
If Obama backs down, his reputation is gone.
If he stick with it and fails, his reputation is gone.
If he sticks with it, succeeds and increases taxes in order to do so, his reputation is gone.
So it isn’t a matter of success. It is simply a matter of him choosing which path to failure he will follow.
Healthcare reconciliation: easier said than explained
The process intricacies that go into lawmaking can stump the hardiest of congressional watchers.
Now that Democrats may decide to use reconciliation to get healthcare legislation passed in Congress, everyone has been scrambling for the easiest possible explanation.
What we found were lots of words and several reports aimed at explaining the process that everyone’s talking about, but no one-line, easy-to-understand, explain-it-to-your-grandmother, definition.
A bare bones, no-frills explanation is that it’s a way to try and pass legislation without needing the 60 votes to overcome yet other procedural hurdles.
My colleague John Whitesides did a step-by-step explanation of the healthcare reconciliation process, to read click here.
A column by Ezra Klein on washingtonpost.com offers “A reconciliation primer” with links to a Congressional Research Service report and an explanation of the Byrd rule.
The New York Times “Prescriptions” blog tried to make reconciliation more interesting by telling readers to think of it as an “evening out.”
The GOP has yet to put a single piece of legislation on the table that benefits anyone but big business. They have staked their future on blocking the agenda of the elected administration and tied themselves to the insurance and financial industries over the interests of the American public. So far, they have lost every legislative confrontation with the majority, and the defeat they have just been dealt in the healthcare fight is historic on many levels. Negative messaging can only go so far in an improving economic environment. Eventually, people realize that one side is putting their political goals above the goals of the nation as a whole.