Health Wars (Battle Of The House Edition)

The body blows of facts keep landing on House BarryCare:

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail.  The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said:  “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail.  It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

Does anybody want to try and keep arguing that liberals are all about "compassion" and "helping the downtrodden" and "fighting for the little guy"?  Does anybody want to carry on the fiction that the Democrat Party looks at the U.S. Constitution as anything but front-line bathroom tissue?  Does anybody want to give Jonah Goldberg any additional heat for coining the phrase "liberal fascism"?

How about the Left's years-long protestations of being "deficit hawks"?  'cause that one's more mythical than your random sasquatch sighting:

As Heritage analysts noted earlier in the week, the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill (H.R. 3962) but too many in the media have not been reporting its true cost. The true cost is not the net spending on only the coverage related provisions ($897 billion) but rather the total gross spending for the coverage provisions ($1.05 trillion) as well as any additional spending in the bill (approximately $217 billion). That would raise the plan’s price tag to about $1.5 trillion when including the roughly $210 billion cost of the “doc fix” is included. The “doc fix” refers to the undoing of the flawed Medicare payment update formula, which Congress created but has routinely stopped from being enforced. Under current law, that formula would result in a 20% reduction in doctors’ pay under the Medicare program.

The real story about the true cost is even more dramatic. The bill is front loaded with taxes, and back-loaded with spending in the first ten years. Since most of the spending in the House bill does not fully go into effect until 2014, the 10-year cost estimates based on the preliminary CBO score (for years 2010 through 2019) only account for six years of new spending under the plan. Once it is implemented (over a full 10-year window from years 2014 to 2023), the giant House health bill carries a price tag of $2.4 trillion, or as much as $2.6 trillion with the “doc fix.”

Trust me, gentles, THIS is the number that got Crazy Nancy "aroused" two weeks ago.

Somebody refresh my memory, please, on where any of this insanity was mentioned in the Democrat campaigns of either 2006 or 2008?  All I seem to remember is raw sewage about "cleaning up Washington" and "the most open, honest, transparent government in American history" and "getting the runaway Bush deficits under control" and all manner of other rotgut BS.  Maybe I've just forgotten it on the other side of all this Bolshevism.  It'd be easy to do, all things considered.  SOMEthing evidently convinced sixty-eight million American voters to hang the chad for these not-so-crypto-communists.  It certainly convinced them that they had a mandate for mass sovietization.

Thing is, the public backlash that has arisen over the course of the spring, summer, and right through last Tuesday, most especially the mass exodus of independents from the Donk banner, seems to suggest otherwise.  One cannot help but get the distinct impression that if Red Barry and his congressional cabal HAD run on what they've tried to force down our throats this year, I'd be spending most of my blogging time bitching about President McCain's serial backstabbing of the efforts of Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McConnell to resurrect the GOP's claim to the mantle of fiscal responsibility.

It would seem that impression is not an isolated one:

There are a dozen first-term Democrats representing districts that Republican presidential nominee John McCain won last year. So far, six have announced that they will vote against their party’s health care bill.

Update, 5:43 p.m. ET: Now there are seven. The New York Daily News has just published a statement from hometown Representative Michael McMahon, D-N.Y. He’s in the no column. “I believe the net negatives of this bill outweight the positive effects,” McMahon says.

Five of those announcements came today. All of the lawmakers who announced opposition cited concerns about the price tag of the legislation, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be more than $1 trillion over ten years.

“After months of thoroughly reviewing legislative proposals and speaking with constituents and stakeholders, I am not satisfied that this bill before us is a sustainable solution,” said Representatiove Frank Kratovil, D-MD Alert readers will remember that he was the congressman hung in effigy during the height of the August town hall meeting uproar.

I don't know if Shrieker Funbags is still twenty-nine votes short of the helly grail, but this doesn't sound like progress is being made via the normal lies, fraud, and all-around chicanery.  Will she force herself to admit that Bart Stupak is holding all the cards as well as her Speakership by the throat?  Because this triumph of all triumphs will be anything but "free".

UPDATE: Sweet merciful crap - she did it.  She really did it:

House Democratic leaders will allow an up-or-down vote on an amendment blocking any money in its healthcare overhaul from funding abortions, risking the votes of members who support abortion rights.

Anti-abortion Representative Bart Stupak (D-MI) had told a bleary-eyed Rules committee panel that a deal struck earlier in the day to move forward on the issue was off.

“There was some compromise language from different proposals that we thought would be satisfactory, our understanding was that we had an agreement. Two hours later it was not an agreement,” Stupak said as the clock neared 1 a.m. Saturday.

As the saying goes, "This changes EVERYTHING."  At least as far as the immediate spectre of House BarryCare passing.  Had Pelosi held the line on abortion funding - as I expected she would - Stupak had (barely) enough votes to combine with minority Republicans to kill the bill outright.  Evidently he would have, or at least Granny believed it, and so desperate was she to get this monstrosity passed that she blinked and caved.  Simply stunning.

Will pro-aborts torpedo BarryCare over their leader's el foldo?  Don't count on it.  First of all, as there's no Dem in the House more radical and extreme than Nancy Pelosi, I have a difficult time picturing Obamunists not following her lead.  Second, they all know that this, er, "sacrifice" will only be temporary, as the Stupak amendment, should it pass, can easily be stripped back out if this disaster ever makes it to conference committee.  And third, remember that Stupak's demand wasn't that his pro-life amendment PASS, but simply receive a floor vote - and he's got no problem with the overall bill otherwise.  If enough Blue Dogs truly fear her more than their constituents, she shouldn't have much difficulty bullying them to bail on Stupak's amendment, right?

Either way, the biggest obstacle to passage has now been effectively removed.  God help us all.

UPDATE II: Just as I feared.  Yeah, nothing we haven't heard plenty of times before, but this time our side is confirming it.

UPDATE III: I suppose this was inevitable.  He lies about "giving Americans health care" instead of taking it away, and rips off Winston Churchill for a gratuituous middle finger flourish.  If he still had WC's bust in the Oval Office, it'd be spinning like a pulsar right about now.

UPDATE IV: Stupak amendment passes 236-190.  Eeyore argues 'Pubbies should have voted "present" in order to keep the Stupak forty on board, but remember, once again, what his demand was: an up or down vote.  He got what he wanted.  He never made its passage part of the deal.  Hard to see how letting it fail would have helped Republicans in any strategic sense any more than putting it over the top will.  Bottom line is, on this one occasion, Nancy Pelosi wasn't crazy.

UPDATE V: 220-215.

I'm reminded of words that will be spoken sixty-nine years from now in one possible future by a British astronomer named Sir John Burke:

It seems that every once in a while, history requires that the monsters win, so that when they are utterly defeated, future generations may count their blessings.

And the monsters, in this case, have won nothing yet.  Consider that if Granny had had Dirty Harry Reid's task, she'd have come forty-one votes short.  And he's got no Stupak macguffin to bail him all the way to cloture.

Not with Tom Coburn set to remind the Senate and the American people what a real filibuster is all about.