Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Desperation in DC

You know Nancy Pelosi doesn't yet have the votes when she's willing to say that perhaps her favored plan for getting the Senate health care plan to a House vote is -- not to make timid House Dems vote on it directly at all. The idea, of course, is "deem and pass," whereby the Rules Committee writes a rule, called a self-executing rule, for a vote on the amendments to the Senate bill the House wants that declares that by voting on the amendments to be pushed through polarizing "reconciliation" -- funny how political terms so often sound like the opposite of their common-sense meaning -- the underlying bill will be deemed to have been passed. I think it's too clever by half and that using it will discredit the House even more than it's already been discredited and cause millions of Americans to see ObamaCare, if it passes, as fundamentally illegitimate. But I'm not counting votes there and Nancy is prettyb good at it.