I have an idea so crazy, it just might work.
I see that our lovely socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is offering an amendment to the health-insurance bill that would change the whole bill to a single-payer bill. So here’s the gist of my totally crazy, probably-won’t-actually-work, Senatorial jiu-jitsu idea:
Get ten hardcore Red-State Senators to actually vote this crap into the bill.
I told you it was nuts 
Now, here’s why: The red-state Democrats can’t vote for that in final passage. They just can’t, they’ll get crucified for it, and they all know it. No Republican, not even Olympia Snowe could vote for final passage on that bill. So what does that mean?
It means that if Sanders’ crackpot scheme actually made it into the bill, it’s DOA. The whole thing is toast. And that’s what we want.
Now we’d have to force Harry Reid to allow this amendment to the floor, but we’ve got the juice to do that, between the Republicans and the fascisti Dems. After it gets to the floor, we have to convince around ten major conservatives to vote for this craptacular amendment. I’d suggest Sens. Bennett (I don’t like him anyway), Inhofe, Sessions, Chambliss, Cornyn, Coburn, DeMint, Thune, Barrasso, and LeMieux (having Crist’s messenger on record for single-payer would be hilariously fun, but probably would never happen). These are either very unlikely to lose re-election, or people who should lose re-election for past idiocy. Hey, I can dream, right?
Now, once this thing is in, the GOP can turn around and scream from the rooftops “GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER!!!” and it will be 100% accurate, 100% immediate. The entire tenor of the argument changes, and you can be flat-out guaranteed a long-lasting filibuster including the following Dems: Baucus (hooboy, Chairman of the Finance committee), Dodd (lives in a state where 20% of the residents work for AETNA), Lieberman, etcetera, etcetera…
Point is, if this amendment gets in, the bill never leaves the Senate. At least, I’m fairly certain it won’t. What do you think?
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
Dan McLaughlin
Neil Stevens
Daniel Horowitz
Too clever by half
civil truth (Diary) Friday, December 4th at 4:13PM EST (link)…and the problem with overthinking is the oven blows up.
The greatest evil…is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. -C.S. Lewis
http://www.gmsplace.com/
They can't reconcile that in conference, either.
Mike (Diary) Friday, December 4th at 4:51PM EST (link)That’s a problem I never even got to.
If the Sanders amendment gets in, the Dems’ coalition is permanently divided, and in a big way. They’d need a legislative tourniquet to stem the hemorrhaging of votes. And they wouldn’t be able to get it OUT of the bill, because the progressives would pitch an absolute fit over it.
It’s a square peg in an intractably round hole, it simply cannot be made to fit. They’d choke on their own policy, and there’s no way that they could blame that on the Republicans — what are they going to say, that we didn’t give them what they wanted?
We’d have given them more than they asked for or expected. And they STILL wouldn’t be able to pass it, because most of the Congress, like most of the People of America, are against single-payer. The term itself is a pejorative.
It’s nuts, yes. But it’s so nuts, it can’t possibly fail
Even the media wouldn’t have any idea what to do.