(H/T Drudge)
On the eve of a primetime address to the Joint Session of Congress, President Obama met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Ried(D-NV). Acording to ABC’s Jake Tapper “sources tell ABC News that in his private meeting with Democratic congressional leaders this afternoon the key word was urgency.”
According to Tapper:
Both leaders told the president that despite the difficult rough and tumble of the legislative process in the last few weeks, they are optimistic that both the House and Senate can pass health care reform legislation.
What will be in the bill remains an open question, though after the meeting, Reid told reporters that “we’re going to do our very best to have a public option or something like a public option before we finish this work.”
President Obama had originally set an August deadline on healthcare legislation, but neither branch of Congress was able to pass any form of a bill. With his original deadline already in the past, Obama has scheduled a primetime address to lay out his plan for getting a bill passed. Of course, it makes PERFECT sense to schedule a plan to pass legislation in the month AFTER the deadline he previously laid out.
President Obama has spent a large amount of “political capital” to try to pass healthcare reform. The President knows he is losing the faith of the general public on the healthcare debate, and he knows the longer it goes on, the worse it will get. Rasmussen reports that 54% say that passing no bill at all is better than the bills currently going through congress. President Obama has decided his only option is to ram a bill down our throats.
Dan McLaughlin
Moe Lane
Neil Stevens
Steve Maley
Remember the urgency of the stimulus?
izoneguy (Diary) Tuesday, September 8th at 9:21PM EST (link)What Obama Says vs. What He Does
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/09/08/what_obama_says_vs_what_he_does.html
One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess– for a program that would not take effect until 2013!
Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years– more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?
If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?
If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don’t we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to “hurry up and wait” on something that is literally a matter of life and death?
If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.
Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.
Unfortunately, this way of doing things is all too typical of the way this administration has acted on a wide range of issues.
The point cannot be made often enough: Modern liberalism, as embodied in the Obama presidency, is the defender of the status quo. And the status quo is a road to economic ruin. Political forces cannot redistribute the wealth that the economic system does not produce.