As I sit here writing, I have the White House Health Care Summit running in the background. This is the meeting where President Obama invited Congressional leaders to sit down at the table in front of the American public and talk about how to find common ground over what has become a very divisive, political debate about healthcare.
Dear Mr. President, we've lied and scared the American people for almost a year now. Don't you think you should be scared & lie, too?
President Obama:
In the spirit of bipartisanship, I've already lied. I just concentrate on lying to my base. And frankly, you should be glad that I'm just not bright enough to be scared of the consequences of doing that.
Greg Sargent flags an email from the RNC that was sent out last night, before the health care summit:
Dear XXXX,
After pledging to listen to Republican ideas at this Thursday's photo op- er, "bipartisan health care summit," President Obama has decided to stick with the Senate Democrats' health care legislation, a bill that Americans have already rejected as a massive restructuring of our economy that is a short walk down the road to government run health care. He's rejected alternative methods of tackling our health insurance crisis before hearing them. He's betrayed the American people's trust.
President Obama's liberal allies on Capitol Hill are going to try to jam this unwanted monstrosity of a bill down your throat. But you're not powerless. You can stop the march of liberalism by signing this petition urging President Obama and his allies to join with Republican leaders to start over on health care reform.
It's time to do away with bills crafted in the dead of night behind closed doors by a team of statist liberals. Instead, we must develop sensible bipartisan legislation that respects individual rights and the Constitution of the United States. It is more important now than ever to send a clear unambiguous message to Washington. Sign the petition today to make your voice heard!
Sincerely,
The GOP Action Team
Wow. Where to start:
Liberalism totally sucks-we need bipartisanship. The email says that liberalism must be stopped, and also calls for "sensible bipartisan legislation." Apparently, "bipartisan" will exclude all liberals, and deny all of their ideas.
Liberals are ramming something down your throat-but this petition to those same liberals will stop them! The RNC is also using the people who receive this email. Supposedly, you can stop liberals from ramming something some your throat by sending them a petition. Yeah, that sounds like it will work. If you just send a petition to these evil assholes who are destroying the country, they will listen to you.
More likely, if you sign this petition and tell your friends about it, the RNC will build up its email list and make more money later.
This email was sent out last night, before the health care summit. It already concluded, before the summit, that the summit was a failure. Nice.
That's some pretty awesome email. If you politely tell these communist wankers to stop ramming something down your throat politely, they will stop ramming something down your throat. Then, we can achieve bipartisan solutions with those same communist wankers.
Note--livestream moved to thread above this one--Chris
Drudge thinks the health care summit is boring:
He isn't wrong. The discussion has been pretty boring up until now. And, if a political junkie like me is bored, I can't imagine that the average voter is exactly sitting on the edge of her chair.
Still, just because a summit is boring does not mean it is unimportant. There are some big impacts of a much-hyped summit being boring:
Both sides seem reasonable. The main reason the summit is boring is that the discussion has turned to esoteric policy proposals. This makes both sides appear reasonable. In turn, that makes charges of "communism" or "obstruction" seem a lot less credible. It looks like well informed people are discussing substantive legislation, rather than throwing bombs at each other.
Deflates urgency. Lower rhetoric means less drama and less urgency for reform, or for blocking reform. With the breathless, desperate rhetoric that has characterized the health reform debate so far weakened by a boring policy discussion, the urgency of passing or blocking health reform is also deflated.
All in all, the summit is a huge net positive for the possibility of passing health reform this year. Democrats were losing the rhetorical battle on this bill, and a boring summit largely helps them. Also, after the Massachusetts special election, health reform has largely dropped from the news and seen activist support take a hit. The build-up to the summit changed all that.
While a boring summit won't make Republicans look like obstructionists, it should still ultimately be a bonus for the prospect of passing health reform.
Update 10--lunch: Actually lunch does sound pretty good right about now.
Update #9--Getting into the weeds: Summit discussion getting into the policy weeds. This is a problem since, as Peter Daou writes over Twitter:
Unfortunately, this #hcr summit is turning into 'let's make GOP cynicism & obstruction look like a legit policy disagreement'
Update 8--Obama notes areas of agreement, asks for Republican rationale for objections: President Obama says he agrees with Republicans in a couple of areas, including some version of tort reform and selling insurance across state lines. He then asks for Republican objections to the insurance exchange. Republicans offer no objections, and just say they have better ideas.
Update 7--Politicians shouldn't quote polls: Mitch McConnell cites some polling. Real leadership. What's worse, he gets it wrong. Claims that polling averages show the country is opposed to the bill 55%-37%. Actually, it is very easy to find that the country is currently opposed 51.4%--41.9%. No surprise McConnell skewed the numbers 8.5% in his favor. Hard to trust him on any numbers after that, given how easy it is to find the actual trendline on health care.
Update #6--Obama and Alexander go back and forth: Lamar Alexander interrupts President Obama, interjecting "Mr. President, if you are going to contradict me...." President Obama does not interrupt back. Alexander attempts to interrupt again, this time President Obama doesn't let him. And then Alexander goes for a third interruption, which also fails.
Update #5: Harry Reid gets aggressive: Harry Reid goes after Lamar Alexander: "you are entitled to your own opinion Lamar, but not your own facts." Also goes after Republican attacks on the use of reconciliation, pointing out that reconciliation is used frequently, and that Republicans have used reconciliation more often than Democrats since 1980. Then, he ties health reform to saving lives and preventing bankruptcy.
Update #4: Speak Pelosi opening remarks: Speaker Pelosi says that Americans don't want to hear about process. She is right. Americans don't follow, care about or understand. As such, Democrats would be wise to use whatever process means they can to pass legislation, leaving Republicans to complain about abstract process. Those complaints will fall on deaf ears, since only small minorities of Americans really care about it.
Update #3--Republican opening remarks: Lamar Alexander starts for Republicans. Alexander he has a good record working across the aisle, but his lifetime record on crucial votes is 1.85%, out of 100.00%, according to Progressive Punch.
Alexander also invokes Democratic opposition to destroying the filibuster in 2005. However, Alexander was not part of the Gang of 14, indicating that he actually favored destroying it himself.
Update #2--President Obama opening remarks: Says he will start summit by focusing on areas where Democrats and Republicans agree, then move to areas where they disagree. Hopes it will be an actual discussion rather than political theater.
Of course, this entire summit is political theater. But it is very good political theater. Holding this summit revived any chance health reform had. It generated millions of constituent contacts to Congress, and scored heaping piles of free media. As political theater goes, this comes from the top shelf.
Update #1--Order of events: After opening remarks, here is the order of events:
1) Controlling costs - introduced by the President;
2) Insurance reforms - introduced by Secretary Sebelius;
3) Reducing the deficit - introduced by the Vice President; and
4) Expanding coverage - introduced by the President.
I will be updating in this thread, which you can consider an open thread for the summit.
Last Monday, after demanding the White House post a health care proposal online before the summit, House Republican leader John Boehner attacked attacked the White House for putting a health care proposal online:
"A productive bipartisan discussion should begin with a clean sheet of paper," Boehner said in a statement.
OK-so, if the health care summit is going to be productive, it is important to throw out old ideas, and start anew.
So naturally, in response to the White House's offer to post any new Republican proposal on Whitehouse.gov, Republicans respond by saying that their proposals have been around for months:
The White House is offering to share Republicans' healthcare alternative on its website before the two sides sit down for their bipartisan summit later this week.(...)
However, Republicans quickly took issue with the White House latest line.
House Republican Leader John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office urged Gibbs instead to "talk with his boss," who only last month discussed healthcare reform with the chamber's GOP members at their annual retreat.
"Our health care alternative - the full text of the legislation - has been available at healthcare.gop.gov for months, which President Obama knows, since he discussed it with us in Baltimore a few weeks ago," spokesman Michael Steele said.
Here is one from the "negotiating in good faith" files.
On February 8th, Republican House leader John Beohner sent a letter to the White House, demanding that the White House post online any health care proposal it wished to discuss at the health care summit:
If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?
So, four days later, the White House accepted this demand, and announced it would post a legislative proposal online more than 72 hours before the summit:
Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package.
So, naturally, the next day, Boehner attacked the White House for giving into his demand:
"A productive bipartisan discussion should begin with a clean sheet of paper," Boehner said in a statement.
President Barack Obama's February 25 health care summit, where he will appear on TV with Republican leaders, has been hailed and assailed as yet another gesture towards bipartisanship. But the summit is really a delaying tactic. It's a decoy, something shiny to keep the chattering classes entertained while Congressional Democrats wheel and deal furiously behind the scenes.
At this point, there are two ways forward, and neither of them require Republican support. The first option is for the House to pass the Senate health care bill as written-but with the understanding that the Senate will later fix certain contentious parts of the bill through reconciliation. The second option is for the Senate to pass the reconciliation fix first and the House to pass the bill later.
Someone has to go first
Art Levine of Working In These Times diagnoses a severe case of paralysis on the left: Nancy Pelosi is willing to entertain the first option, but labor leaders like Rich Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, want the Senate to go first because they don't trust the Senate to fix the bill later. Nobody wants to go first, but somebody has to. If neither the House nor the Senate takes the initiative, reform will fail by default and Americans will continue to suffer.
If the Democrats are going to attempt reconciliation, they need a plan to steer the legislation through the Senate. While everyone else is talking about the summit, procedural experts are probably huddling with leadership, nailing down the details.
Obama's 'Waterloo'
Everyone knows that Obama isn't going to pick up any Republican votes, summit or no summit. The House bill got 1 Republican vote, the Senate bill got 0. Quite simply, Republicans want health care reform to fail. No Republican president since Richard Nixon has attempted comprehensive health care reform. In opposition, Republicans have been intractably opposed reform because they're afraid the Democrats will take credit for it. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) famously said he wanted "break" Obama by making health reform the president's "Waterloo."
Health care reform in the media
Meanwhile, as Monica Potts notes in TAPPED, the media seems to be bending over backwards to treat the Republican's pro forma suggestions as serious proposals for reform, even though the Congressional Budget Office has already analyzed the plan and determined that it will leave millions uninsured without lowering costs. The health care bills as written are already chock full of Republican proposals, like eliminating the public option, easing restrictions on buying insurance across state lines, allowing people to band together in insurance-purchasing coops.
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones worries that the upcoming summit will just give the Republicans more free airtime to spread falsehoods about "government controlled health care."
Voices of the uninsured
This week, The Nation is publishing the stories of some of the millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans: An uninsured woman who was diagnosed with throat cancer last month; a father with a severely disabled son who is about to hit is $5 million lifetime insurance benefit cap; a single mom on the verge of medical bankruptcy; and many others.
In other news
Dr. Gabor Maté, the official physician of Canada's only supervised drug injection site, talks about the science of addiction and his new book with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!.
Todd A. Heywood reports in the Michigan Messenger that American Family Association of Michigan is doubling down in the dying days of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Not only do they want to ban gays from the military, they want to re-criminalize homosexuality.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
I have learned, in background discussions with Republican leaders, of additional demands they have made to President Obama on the proposed health care summit. While these demands were later removed from the letter they eventually sent to President Obama, I have been able to reconstruct them here:
The bipartisan health care summit must be scrapped in order to secure Republican participation in the summit.
The elimination from public instruction in Serbia, both as regards the teaching body and the methods of instruction, all that serves or might serve to foment the propaganda against Austria-Hungary.
A bowl of M&M candies, with all the brown M&M's removed, should be placed in the Republican dressing room.
Leia and the Wookiee must never again leave this city.
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