Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Cornhusker Blowback

Ben Nelson is going to join the Republican Party in voting against the health care reconciliation package. After all the hard stuff we've done, we've got our enemies lined up supporting the Cornhusker Kickback as we vote to remove it. This is going to be fun!

It's going to be the second time in a week that Democrats are on what Republicans have presented as the right side of a procedural issue. I'd really like to know the inside story behind the decision not to use deem-and-pass to get the health care bill through. Republicans spent several days working themselves into fury about it and calling it "Demon Pass." And then the Democratic leadership quietly decided that they weren't going to do it. If you think Republicans get advantages from the right-wing noise machine, it's nice to just waste 3 days of its output. One wonders if this was the plan all along.

Jonathan Bernstein wrote about how the Republicans spent a very large amount of their time engaging in procedural objections to the legislation rather than substantive ones. Now one of those objections is going to be turned back against them, and one of them is going to be an objection to something Democrats actually ended up not doing.

2 comments:

Nick Beaudrot said...

I woke up too early. I read "Ben Nelson is going to join the Republican Party...". Two thoughts flashed through my head, in order

(1) Crap! We're down to 58!
(2) Does it really matter?

Ron E. said...

The wonder is that Lieberman hasn't already announced he'll vote no on reconciliation (I hope I get this comment in before he does).