The Repeal Begins....Sort Of

What do Democrats do when facing electoral Armageddon at the hands of a vengeful electorate infuriated over having had their Health Care Reform Of A Lifetime rammed down their throats in "dangerously authoritarian" fashion?  Easy - pretend to repeal an itsy-bitsy-teeny-weenie (and, IMHO, deliberately-inserted-for-this-precise-purpose) and maximally obnoxious portion of it while really changing nothing:

Facing a backlash from small businesses over a new tax-reporting requirement in the healthcare law the president signed in March, the Obama administration is embracing the first change to the landmark legislation.

In a letter to Senate leaders, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner urged the Senate to back a proposal to scale back the new reporting mandate.

The law requires businesses to report to the Internal Revenue Service transactions worth more than $600, a provision that was added to the law to raise an estimated $17 billion over a decade and offset the cost of expanding coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

The small item garnered little attention when it was inserted into the gargantuan legislation.

Time for another Travis Hudson special: BULLSHIT!  I sure as snotballs noticed it, because it hits me right where I live for a living.  Churning out several hundred 1099-MISCs falls squarely on my professional plate, which is why I have my department working on it already.  What the L.A. Times means is that they and their cocksucking Obamedia bottom-feeder douchebags didn't REPORT it, because if they had, this backlash would have been (even more of) a frontlash and the atrocity might, just might, have gone down in flames.  And the destruction of American health care was JUST TOO IMPORTANT to let the TRUTH be told about it and passed through the normal, open, honest, transparent legislative process like any other 2,800-page bill.

Now that the lash is lashing them like Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ seven weeks before Judgment Day, Dems desperately need a way to caviezel out of this self-inflicted predicament while still holding on to that $17 bil in stolen lucre.  Enter Bill "Major" Nelson:

Most Democrats now claim they were blindsided and didn’t understand the implications of the 1099 provision—which is typical of the slapdash, destructive way the bill was written and passed. As the critics claimed, most Members had no idea what they were voting on. Some 239 House Democrats voted to dump the 1099 provision in August, and the repeal would have passed except Speaker Pelosi rigged the vote procedurally so it needed a two-thirds majority. She thus gave Democrats the cover of a repeal vote without actually repealing it.

In the Senate today, Nebraska Republican Mike Johanns will offer his amendment to scrap the new 1099 rules altogether. But the White House is opposing this because it fears it would set a precedent for repealing the larger health bill. Over the weekend the Treasury Department pronounced the Johanns amendment “not acceptable in its current form.”

Yesterday the White House endorsed a competing proposal from Florida Democrat Bill Nelson that would increase the 1099 threshold to $5,000 and exempt businesses with fewer than twenty-five workers. Yet this is little more than a rearguard action in favor of the status quo; the Nelson amendment leaves the basic architecture unchanged while making the problem more complex.

Businesses would still have to track all purchases, not knowing in advance which contractors will exceed $5,000 at the end of the year. It also creates a marginal barrier to job creation—for a smaller firm, hiring a 26th employee would be extremely costly. The Nelson amendment also includes new taxes on domestic oil production, as every Democratic bill now seems to do.

Even if you don't have to send out as many 1099-MISCs, in other words, you still need to gather all the name/address/Federal Employer ID # information via W-9 forms and track all vendor purchases.  So what this really is is not a repeal of the original provision, but piling new energy taxes on top of O-Care.  You might even call it "exploiting a crisis in order to do things you couldn't otherwise do".

Also today, Gene Taylor (D-MS4) became the first House Donk to sign a GOP discharge petition bringing a full repeal bill to the floor for an up or down vote.  And he's in a safe seat.

Coincidence?  Only of the serendipitous variety.