Can’t get a 60-vote majority, and reconciliation seems unobtainable?  Just play make-believe.

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers "deem" the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a "self-executing rule" or a "deem and pass" — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

"It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know," the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. "But I like it," she said, "because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill."

Why bother with a pesky Presidential signature, or an actual up-or-down vote, when keister-covering is so much more politically expedient?  Let’s just pretend the bill passed.

Shouldn’t something as massive as this have broad bipartisan support?  But not even the Democrats themselves, when they held a 60-vote majority, could get it past their own folks.  This is just wrong.

While I’m just as "avid" a fan of Glenn Beck as Rusty (i.e. only really catch him on the occasional web snippet), I have read the transcript of his "social justice" rant, and I really don’t think Beck said what his detractors say he said.

Beck was talking about churches/denominations for whom one of their driving forces is implementing aid to the poor and oppressed via government force, and seem to think that almost every time Jesus opened His mouth He was speaking economics.  (I’ve seen the parable of the sower turned into one where the birds taking away the seed were priests taking temple tithes and tribute, and the thorns choking out the seed were the Roman tax collectors stealing from these humble farmers.  Jesus said plainly what He meant, but some can still wrangle an economic message out of it they find more palatable.)  The term "social justice" seems to figure prominently in these forms of theology, and Beck was just saying that you should avoid them completely if you see that they do. 

What his critics are doing are quoting Bible verses that show we should help the poor.  Thing is, I don’t think Beck would disagree, and it doesn’t appear at all that he was saying he disagreed.  What he was saying is that churches where the phrases "social justice" and "economic justice" figure prominently are the ones trying to "spread the wealth around" via legislation and are going to bankrupt us in doing so; a political message.  Of the reports so far, only Hannah Siegel, reporting for ABC news, even mentioned this:

Stu Burguiere, executive producer at "The Glenn Beck Radio Program," sought to clarify Beck’s comments today.

"Like most Americans, Glenn strongly supports and believes in ‘social justice’ when it is defined as ‘good Christian charity,’" he said. "Glenn strongly opposes when Rev. Wright and other leaders use ‘social justice’ as a euphemism for their real intention — redistribution of wealth."

So Beck is in favor of the concept of social justice (without the quotes) but against those who use that term to couch ends that he finds immoral.

But the reactions from critics seem to miss this completely.  When Wallis insinuates that Beck is lined up against Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa, or National Council of Churches President Rev. Canon Peg Chemberlin says, "Justice is a concept throughout the scriptures", they’re both completely misrepresenting what Beck actually said. 

Beck does need to clarify, on-air, that he is in favor of the concept of social justice, though, if you fairly read his words, he never once insinuated that he wasn’t in favor of giving to the poor; this clarification would be for those who didn’t realize that the first time.  I understand that he did just that recently, though I haven’t heard or read what he said yet. 

Albert Mohler has the most balanced analysis of this issue.  Read the whole thing.  However, I want to quote one bit from it, showing how many Beck critics really missed the point.  Mohler notes that Beck’s aims are political.  However…

My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ — the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church’s main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ’s command and the example of the apostles.

There is more to that story, however. The church is not to adopt a social reform platform as its message, but the faithful church, wherever it is found, is itself a social reform movement precisely because it is populated by redeemed sinners who are called to faithfulness in following Christ. The Gospel is not a message of social salvation, but it does have social implications.

I grew up in the Salvation Army; a social services arm of the Christian church if ever there was one.  But one that stays true to this concept of creating social change by implementing the Gospel, not a government program.

Yes, that 9th Circuit.  The same one that ruled it unconstitutional before.

A federal appeals court upheld the use of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" on U.S. currency, rejecting arguments Thursday that the phrases violate the separation of church and state.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel rejected two legal challenges by Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow, who said the references to God are unconstitutional and infringe on his religious beliefs.

The same appeals court caused a national uproar and prompted accusations of judicial activism when it decided in Newdow’s favor in 2002, ruling that the pledge violated the First Amendment prohibition against government endorsement of religion.

But here’s the thing.  The last time he tried this, it went to the Supreme Court which simply said he had no standing.  So they never really dealt with the salient issue.

Now, the 9th Circuit takes up the exact same issue, and, lacking some SCOTS precedent to fall back on, rules in the opposite direction. 

Apparently, it’s all due to the luck of the (judicial) draw; it depends on which 3 judges you get.  Although…

In a separate 3-0 ruling Thursday, the appeals court upheld the inscription of the national motto "In God We Trust" on U.S. coins and currency, citing an earlier 9th Circuit panel that ruled the phrase is ceremonial and patriotic and "has nothing whatsover to do with the establishment of religion."

I’d say, neither does "under God" in the pledge; it’s a statement of historical fact.  Still, "In God We Trust" gets a 3-0 unanimous decision while "under God" goes 2-1.  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals richly deserves it’s position as the most overruled appeals court in the country.

Hat Tip: Stop the ACLU

It is better to empower the people to be more charitable by letting them keep their money in order to give it than to get the government in the health care business.  It is both cheaper and more moral. 

Will people fall through the cracks if this is left up to the people?  Yes.  And it will be the same for a government program.  Don’t let the "perfect" be the enemy of the "good", especially if the "perfect" is clearly known to be unobtainable. 

Trying to obtain that perfection via government will do 2 things.  First, it will not happen.  Second, it will give more power and money to a government already awash in both.  For those that already despise dealing with a more local insurance company, multiply that for dealing with the government.  (Including, yes, "death panels", just like they have in Canada, in behavior if not title.)

But will government involvement, if not perfect, be at least better than we have now?  Perhaps we could ask that cancer patient in Alberta (follow that link up there) who came to Minnesota to get lifesaving surgery.  Or you could read the article in the London Times about how the liberal Labour party hid the truth about patient neglect in their National Health Service.  If your measure of "success" is how many people have health insurance, then sure, it would be "better".  But if you factor in the quality of care, not so much.

Because our system isn’t perfect, don’t make a deal with the devil.  Our founding fathers felt government to be a necessary evil.  They were students of history that saw the natural tendency of government and tried to avoid those problems when they wrote the Constitution so that government’s power was limited.  We are "unwriting" those limits if we do this.

Nancy Pelosi:

You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other.  But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.  Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

Emphasis added (by Reason magazine), and it speaks for itself.  No matter what they tell you about the bill, they’re not telling you everything.  No matter what they say it’ll cost, they won’t say all of it.  "Trust us to overhaul the health care insurance industry, with a bill made with back-room deals with unions, and bribes for votes."

Yeah, right.  It’s huge and it’s shrouded, and it’s a classic carnival huckster method.  How can people actually fall for this?

I wrote last Friday about "3rd rails" in American politics; programs like Social Security and Medicare that, no matter how wasteful, politicians can’t substantially deal with.  The reason is that the government has made promises, people have reordered their lives around those promises, and thus any attempt to change the conditions of those promises is met with vehement opposition.

This, then, is related to the eternal life of government programs.  Part of the reason some of these programs live on is because the promises made and the responsibility to live up to them and honor them.  The problem is, we have to honor them even if doing so bankrupts us (or, more specifically, future generations).  We have to honor them even if the money could be spent more efficiently another way, getting the same job done only with better results.  We are already saddled with debt because of some of these huge programs, but are also saddled with current and future promised payments that we can’t afford now, and thus will have to tell our children to make good on.

Is that moral?

Some have said that it’s immoral not to take care of the elderly and infirmed, but by doing it on the backs of our children and grandchildren, is that really the more moral route?  With the health care reform bill, we are making promises that future generations must pay for.  And we are making promises that they may not be able to afford at all after this generation has already spent their inheritance on previous promises made.

And, as I noted previously, no matter what you hear from any politician on how much this or that program will cost, it will cost more.  History is strewn with so many examples of this that anyone believing these numbers is utterly ignorant, willfully or otherwise. 

Making promises binds us to honor them, which is a good thing.  But making promises with an inefficient bureaucracy binds us to a millstone that will continue to take us down with its unsustainable load, and we can’t afford that.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So, governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth. — Ronald Reagan (click here for the audio clip)

I’d say with precious few exceptions, Reagan’s words express a truism for any government instituted by man. 

Given this, it simply doesn’t make sense to make huge changes to our health insurance system, putting so much under the purview of the government, all at once.  Once it’s there, no matter how poorly it work, those who benefit from the programs (or believe they do) will make up such a constituency that no politician will dare cross them.  It’ll become yet another 3rd rail that no one wants to touch.  The only option will be to throw good (borrowed) money after bad.

I can say this with confidence because that tracks with history.  It has happened time and time again, and there’s not one thing to indicate that if this doesn’t do what it claims to do, it’ll be scrapped.  Instead, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that government, regardless of which party’s in charge, will constantly try to "fix it", usually by giving the federal government more control and taking that control and freedom away from the individual. 

The better way to do this is incrementally, but the same problems can plague even these smaller items unless these items increase public freedoms.  For example, allowing health insurance to be purchased across state line is something that would give individuals more choices and hence drive down costs.  When you can only by apples from one  vendor, he can charge what he likes, and it doesn’t matter how good his apples are; where else are you going to go?  When there are 20 vendors, competition ensues and vendors compete on cost and quality.  Allowing this would have immediate results, and the results could be determined to be good or bad.  Actually, I see no real downside to this particular proposal from the Republicans, but if there were, it’s easier to repeal a small law than a huge, intertwined, governmental system. 

[One might ask, doesn’t the proposed public option increase competition?  Well yes, but by 1 rather than by hundreds.  But the general problem with getting the government into the market is that the government makes the market’s rules as well and can undercut competition because it doesn’t have to pay its costs from charging for the service; it can tax everyone on the side, hiding its true price on your 1040 form.]

A massive overhaul of any industry is not something government should be doing.  That’s another reason why I oppose the Democrat’s health care reform bill.

As events continue to unfold while the health insurance reform bill comes either to a vote or a train wreck (or both), I want to hit on a few main reasons why I’m against the Democrats’ idea of "reform".  Today, it’s the money.

Obama has said that whatever he signs must be either deficit-neutral or indeed reduce it, and the claims are that this bill will do just that.  In fact, it’s one of the reasons Democrats say that using reconciliation — typically used for deficit reduction — is appropriate.  They point to the CBO numbers for the bill as coming in under $1 trillion for the first 10 years, while generating savings that would go beyond that.

But here’s the thing. 

First of all, they’re gaming the CBO system.  By putting off any real serious spending for 4 years or so, while collecting taxes in anticipation of the spending, the real cost of the program is hidden.  To find the real estimates, click here to hear Democratic Senator Max Baucus give a better number for it; $2.5 trillion.  The difference?  In his words; if you start counting from the year 2014.  Knowing that the CBO rules only look 10 years out from bill passage, Democrats have crafted the timetable to favor a low CBO number, and they trumpet this fake number on the talk shows.  At least we have Senate video to show that they do know better, but they’re just hoping their constituents aren’t paying attention (which it looks like they aren’t).

Second of all, government programs virtually always cost more than original estimates, whether this is because the first estimates were faulty or gamed, or whether folks like the giveaways so much they ask for more, or whether politicians buy votes by increasing benefits.  The "experts" who were estimating the cost of Medicare back in 1966 — when it cost $3 billion — said that by 1990 it would cost $12 billion, allowing for inflation.  Instead they were off by almost 9 times; it was $107 billion.  And in 2007, it was costing us $431 billion.  For just 1 year.  Even after cost cutting measure like reducing payments to doctors, which then causes some doctors to leave the Medicare market.  (Follow the link for other medical cost underestimating.)

So in order to get this past the American people, Democrats are massaging the data to fit the narrative, while knowing full well (if they have any knowledge of history at all) that they are low-balling by an order of magnitude or more. 

It’s not just the cost estimates; it’s the disingenuousness and outright lying that is going on that should give any supporter pause as to what it is they’ve bought into.

Should something as huge as the remaking of the healthcare system in America be done in such a "unipartisan" manner?  Ask Barack Obama.  That was then:

And this is now:

White House officials tell ABC News that in his remarks tomorrow President Obama will indicate a willingness to work with Republicans on some issue to get a health care reform bill passed but will suggest that if it is necessary, Democrats will use the controversial "reconciliation" rules requiring only 51 Senate votes to pass the "fix" to the Senate bill, as opposed to the 60 votes to stop a filibuster and proceed to a vote on a bill.

So then, it requires a "sizeable majority" so long as it doesn’t take too long.  Then all bets are off.  Gotcha.

There are those who say that our government is "us", so to speak, and thus if health care reform passes, it’s because we wanted it.  Well, except that a majority of us don’t.  This isn’t representative government.  Yes, the general idea did enamor more folks when it first hit Congress, but the more people know about it, the less they have wanted it.  With one exception, opposition to it has been over 50% since the middle of September, and peaked over 50% often before that. 

Most of us don’t want this monstrosity.  But Obama is more than willing to shove aside his principles of good governance, and do precisely what he accused Bush and Rove of, in order to get his way.  Representative government indeed.

There is currently, as is well known, a debate on health policy. Within this debate it seems to me there is a fundamental misunderstanding between right and left on this matter. I’d like to make as pointed a expression of this misunderstanding in the hopes that those on the left might clarify for my their views on this matter.

The left makes the following claims:

1. Restructuring healthcare is required because of the millions without any health insurance coverage.
2. Controlling the rising costs of healthcare is a major concern as well. Therefore the healthcare bill contains measures to contain and regulate pharmaceutical and insurance firm profits as well as doctors compensations. 

These items are problematic especially in the light of the three proposals on the table from the left.

Regarding item 1, a plan which would provide a minimal adequate universal catastrophic health care coverage is neither complicated nor cost prohibitive. It does not require a 2.5k page plan, one more of the nature of 40 pages would suffice, i.e., not much larger than the heath care coverage legal statement/booklets which most of of have for our own plans. This is not by any stretch of imagination the healthcare plan on the table. Therefore it cannot be construed that this issue is in fact a real feature/concern of the plan(s) in question.

As to item number 2, the first and more natural explanation for rising costs is due to a relationship between supply and demand. That is rising costs are symptomatic of rising demand in comparison with a supply. The bill(s) in question instead of consisting of a mechanism for increasing supply and/or attempting to ameliorate expectations or demand is instead more of the nature of a price control and regulatory scheme. In the real world, price controls of commodity items lead to lowered supply and scarcity … not increased production. That is price controls are in reality very good ways to choke off and decrease the supply of a thing. Furthermore the profit margins of insurance companies and “big pharma” are not out of line when compared to comparable industries. Expectations of large cost savings by regulation are not warranted, and this is in addition to the above noted deleterious effects of cost controls.

Putting these two remarks and their objections together alongside the much touted (by the left) reminder that those on the left are so very much smarter than we knuckle-dragging dim-witted conservatives that the left is aware of this disconnect between their policy proposals and the expected effects of their proposal. Thus those clever fellows on the left realising that a universal reasonable catastrophic insurance coverage plan is 40 pages and that cost controls do lead to shortages. 

Now one might propose that the Democratic politicians and pundits are aware that their proposals and justifications for the same have little if anything to do with each other and that instead that they prefer these proposals for very different reasons than those stated. For example, these proposals may ease the passing of any number of other social measures which the increase in social control and power these bills might afford. That, while dishonest at best, is at least understandable after all they see this measure to be one which is to their personal advantage. The problem is the rank and file member of the left. Why do they support a bill which so badly fits the stated aims? This, for me, a mystery.

That was then:

During George Bush’s term in office, every renewal the Patriot Act became grand theater, with newspapers inveighing against the overreach of Bush and the danger to American liberty in the bill, which wasn’t an entirely vacuous argument.  Protesters would fill streets, and reporters would demand positions from various members of Congress.

This is now:

The House of Representatives reauthorized the Patriot Act for one year Thursday.

The vote was 315-97 .

Many liberals in the House opposed the controversial act, saying it tramps Constitutional protections and civil liberties.

It’s not so much that the Congressional Democrats didn’t want another major battle in the middle of trying to get other massive legislation passed that I noticed as much as the lack of outrage from the grassroots Left prior to this.  Massive protests did not seem to appear on the MSM radar, or perhaps they ignored them.  But there’s certainly been a lot less harping on civil liberty issues from that side of the aisle ever since their guy sat down in the Oval Office.

But apparently, this was a battle that Democrats just didn’t seem to think mattered enough to fight.  Now that’s change hypocrisy we can believe in.

Otherwise known as the Health Care Summit.

Bruce McQuain at Q&O has a good round-up of the day’s talkfest. 

I’ve been watching and/or listening to the health care summit today and it became fairly obvious from the opening bell that there wasn’t going to be much of anything worthwhile or substantive accomplished – not that I’m surprised.   5 hours into it, it has been mostly the exchange of talking points.

Did anybody really think this was anything more than a very long press conference?  Or perhaps a fig leaf of "transparency" for a bill that has been worked out almost entirely in back rooms.

One thing I thought was interesting was that tort reform, often handwaved away as not really saving much, was shown to be something that, if Democrats are serious about controlling costs and not beholden to the trial lawyers, should be in any reform bill.

Republicans have argued for tort reform for medical malpractice. Democrats (Dick Durbin in particular) have argued against it. McCain used the Texas model to make the point for tort reform. Texas, which has instituted tort reform has seen malpractice premiums reduced by 27% and has had a net gain of 18,000 doctors – extrapolated nationally using direct savings (malpractice insurance premium cost) and indirect savings (reduction of the “defensive medicine” practiced by doctors) the amount saved could be in the $150 billion range.

Certainly worth putting in if the Democrats are serious.  We’ll see.

In going through anecdote after anecdote trying to prove their points, it seems one Democrat got the wrong moral of the story.

Chris Dodd is now telling a story about a guy who privately put together a small business health care association in CT. Of course the point lost on him as he argues for the government to act is it was done privately and perhaps the government’s role ought to be enabling that. Rep. Joe Barton is now making that point.

Local solutions to local problems, not one-size-fits-all square pegs in round holes.  Give the people the freedom to get done what they need to, and whadaya’ know; they will!

Bottom line – no bi-partisan attempt on either side to reach a compromise. And again, that’s fine.

Amen to that.

Last week, Iran announced it can produce weapons-grade uranium.  British PM Gordon Brown spoke out "strongly".

As Gordon Brown warned that the world’s patience is wearing thin, Ahmadinejad told scores of cheering Iranians that the Islamic Republic is capable of producing weapons-grade uranium.

Does this remind anyone of Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam as they got red-faced and growled, just before Bugs Bunny again showed them for the fools they are?  I took Brown’s actual words and tossed them through The Dialectizer, and they sound much more "in character", shall we say.

‘I bewieve the mood awound the wowwd is now incweasingwy one whewe, patience not being inexhaustibwe, peopwe awe tuwning to wook at the specific sanctions we can pwan on Iwan,’ Mr Brown said. ‘Dis is a cwiticaw time fow Iwan’s wewationship wif the west of the wowwd.’

Follow this by dropping an anvil on his head to complete the mental picture.

Last night on a new program called Deep End, the attorneys conspired to have Congress pass a law for one individual–the Chinese widow of a American soldier killed in Afghanistan. My wife Debbie, who worked for some time for Congressman John Linder of Georgia, recalled that they dealt with these kinds of requests–and advanced them–from time to time.

That got us March 2005 there was high drama when the lights of the Capitol were on past midnight Sunday for the Congress to pass a bill and the President returned to Washington to sign it at 2 a.m., allowing the federal courts to consider the Schiavo case.

I was involved in a similar action in 1989: the Elizabeth Morgan case.

I was working at the time as chief of staff for Chuck Colson at Prison Fellowship Ministries. Our staff working at the District of Columbia jail had met a woman there who stood out in a number of ways. Dr. Elizabeth Morgan was a tall, white, affluent plastic surgeon from northwest DC in a jail full of almost entirely poor black women from east of the river.

She was already a heroine in the jail. She has been there for nearly two years for contempt of court because she refused to allow her six-year-old daughter to go on court-ordered overnight visits to her ex-husband. She accused her husband of sexual abuse of the child, hidden the child, and went to jail rather than tell the court where the child was.

The imprisoned women, the large majority of whom had been abused (you find this in most women’s prisons in the country), loved Morgan for her courage in protecting her daughter from abuse.

Judge Dixon of the District court could not be persuaded that Morgan’s ex-husband, Virginia oral surgeon Eric Foretich, had been abusive. He would not budge, he cited Morgan for contempt, sent her to jail—-and left her there.

When Morgan and this case came to our attention, we were amazed by her fortitude and by length of time an unconvicted individual had spent in prison. When we studied the evidence, it, and the witness of Morgan’s action, persuaded us that there had been sexual abuse.

Colson wrote an article calling for Morgan’s release, for which he was condemned and praised. Interestingly, it was our natural allies, the conservative Christians, who were outraged, and our usual adversaries, the liberals and women’s rights activists, who were supportive.

(Both Morgan and Foretich were professed Christians, but he was of the more conservative variety and a member of a prominent northern Virginia evangelical church).

We began lobbying our conservative Christian brethren. I went to visit with James Dobson and presented our large file of evidence. He agreed to have Colson on the Focus on the Family radio program. Our campaign picked up steam.

At the same time, we talked with our local Virginia congressman, Frank Wolf, about the case, as well as a few Senators. I remember one strategic lunch in the Senate Dining Room with a Senator from Tennessee, whose influence was necessary to create and move a piece of legislation to free Dr. Morgan.

Within a couple of months, our efforts were successful. The U.S. Congress passed a bill specifically for the release of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan. She was freed from prison after serving the longest detention for civil contempt in American history–25 months.

In February 1990, the daughter was discovered living in New Zealand with her maternal grandparents. A New Zealand court gave Morgan sole custody, but the visitation requirement by the U.S. court remained in effect, meaning that if Morgan returned to America with her daughter she would still have to allow her ex-husband to see their daughter. That wasn’t going to happen. Morgan remained in New Zealand with her daughter.

In 2003, a federal appeals court ruled that the law passed by Congress to help the mother was unconstitutional because it applied to one person. By that time, the daughter was 21 and safe from the harm which a mother spent two years in jail to protect her.

What if I told you that we’re spending as much on defense now as we were when Jimmy Carter was President?  Yeah, I’d laugh, too.  But the Cato Institute notes that, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, defense spending is indeed at late-1970s levels.

What’s also interesting to see is that non-defense spending, by the same measure, having stayed at about the same percentage of GDP for 30 years or so, has skyrocketed under Obama.

(Click on the image for the accompanying article.)

Defense spending, a constitutional role of government, is really not the problem when it comes to our national debt.  Just an FYI.