House Democrats are suspicious of each other, none of them trust their Senate counterparts, and vice versa, and a Soviet mole has infiltrated the highest levels of British intelligence. Sorry, that last part is from a John le Carré thriller, though it might take a novelist to do justice to the ObamaCare-induced paranoia that now engulfs Congress—not to mention the double game that the White House may well be running.
Last week President Obama sanctioned “reconciliation,” a complex tactic that would jam ObamaCare into law on sheer power politics. But what if this gambit is really a false-flag operation, meant to lure House Democrats into voting for a bill that they would otherwise oppose? That’s the question many rank-and-file Members are now asking themselves, and they’re right to be worried.
The cleanest option for Democrats would be for the House to pass the Senate’s Christmas Eve bill word for word, thereby bypassing a Senate filibuster under the normal rules and forwarding ObamaCare directly to the Rose Garden signing ceremony. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said the votes simply don’t exist for the Senate bill as is.
Liberals don’t think the middle-class insurance subsidies are large enough. Big Labor hates the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health coverage because extremely generous benefits typically come out of collective bargaining. The pro-life Democrats led by Michigan’s Bart Stupak can’t abide federal funding for abortion. Everyone detests the enveloping corruption, such as the Nebraska Medicaid bribe for Ben Nelson, which has become so politically toxic that the opponents now include Ben Nelson.
Thus the convoluted scheme the White House has mapped out. The House would first pass the Senate bill, and then pass a reconciliation bill that addresses these objections—in effect converting the process into a makeshift and unprecedented vehicle for amendments. Mrs. Pelosi can’t rope in the 216 votes she needs without an iron-clad promise of another round of Senate action.
Iron-clad promise—or double-cross? After all, the White House would much prefer the Senate bill, because by its lights the cost-control programs are tougher than what the House prefers. And from a political perspective, a bill that can be signed immediately and that the press will portray as an historic achievement is far better than the drawn-out and gory battle that would be reconciliation. Republican Senators will have many procedural knives at their disposal, and the process will force Democrats to cast further votes and spend more months debating a deeply unpopular bill.
In other words, perhaps Mr. Obama has embraced this reconciliation two-step only to renege as soon as the House gives him what he wants. While some House Democrats would be furious, they’d soon be defending the Senate bill by necessity against the GOP. The moderates who vote for it might be collateral damage, but the White House has already concluded that this is the price of building its cradle-to-grave entitlement citadel.
Mr. Obama’s closing arguments are lending credence to rank-and-file fears that they’re getting played. Democrats are telling reporters that Mr. Obama has been telling them in private meetings that his Presidency, and the party’s claim to any achievement, rests on passing a bill. With barely any mention of substance, the right bill is any bill, by any political means necessary.
The White House also announced that it now wants the House to pass the Senate bill by March 18, before Mr. Obama departs for a foreign tour in the Pacific. But this barely leaves any time for the Congressional Budget Office to score Mr. Obama’s reconciliation fixes. Then there’s House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s far-fetched suggestion to Mr. Stupak and the antiabortion bloc that Democrats can take care of their concerns in a third bill, which everyone knows will fail in the Senate if it even comes to the floor.
In this wilderness of political mirrors, anything is possible. Spooked Democrats shouldn’t be surprised if they wind up being double-crossed for the ostensibly greater good of Mr. Obama’s legacy. (WSJ)
Trust Mr “Hope and Change”?
Mr “No tax if you make less $250,000 per year”
Mr “they (Republicans) have no ideas”
Trust Me. 
Why ever would you be worried?
Look at that face. And he speaks so well (and put on a Negro Dialect when he wants to- according his aides).
It’s Not all about Him.
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Then you read this, also in The Wall Street Journal:
Everyone knows Democrats are planning to use the budget reconciliation process to get ObamaCare through the Senate. Less well known is that Democrats are plotting add-ons to that bill to get other liberal priorities enacted—programs that could never attract 60 votes.
One of these controversial measures rewrites the Higher Education Act to ban private companies from offering federally guaranteed student loans as of this July. Congress has already passed laws in recent years discouraging private lenders from making loans without a federal guarantee. But most college financial-aid departments still want private companies to originate and service the guaranteed loans. That’s because the alternative—a public option run by the Department of Education—has been distinguished by its Soviet-style customer service.
The Democratic plan is to make this public option the only option mere days before colleges send out their financial aid packages to incoming students. The House and Senate budget committees issued instructions last year to look for savings in the student-lending program, so the Democrats have prepared in advance their excuse to jam these changes through the reconciliation process.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan portrays the changes as eliminating subsidies to private companies, but no one should misinterpret these comments to mean that taxpayers will benefit. The plan that passed the House includes $67 billion in “savings,” according to a Friday estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. But the bill also has more than $77 billion in new spending.
The net loss to taxpayers isn’t limited to $10 billion. After inquiries from Senator Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) and Rep. John Kline (R., Minn.) last year, CBO explained that “savings” estimates are artificially high because of government accounting rules that undercount the risks of default when the government is originating the loans, while the new spending estimates are artificially low. This could be significant. Many colleges oppose the government plan specifically because the feds don’t make the same effort to prevent defaults that the private lenders do.
Taxpayers have even more reason than academics to fear the impact, in part because the public may not learn the details before this plan becomes law. Democrats aim to bring their education revolution to the floor without a committee vote or even a hearing in the Senate.
Democrats might seek to enact the bill passed by the House last summer, an even more ambitious plan sketched out in the President’s 2011 budget, or some mystery meat prepared by chef Tom Harkin, who chairs the Senate education committee. So far he won’t tell anyone what’s on the menu, and he may not have to. The limited 20 hours of reconciliation debate will no doubt be consumed by ObamaCare, but another new entitlement could be hustled into law under cover of bloviating lawmakers.
Both the House-passed bill and the President’s budget increase Pell Grants and also create automatic future increases, so individual grants will grow faster than inflation every year. Colleges will pocket the money by raising tuition, so we have yet another federal program ensuring that higher education costs continue to rise even faster than health-care spending.
Mr. Obama’s budget also calls for making Pell Grants a mandatory entitlement. At least now they are subject to annual appropriation and their growth can be slowed when tax revenues fall or other priorities rate higher. Mr. Obama would prefer spending that is quite literally out of control.
“Various changes that the President proposes to the Pell Grant program would add another $0.2 trillion to the deficit between 2011 and 2020,” CBO said Friday. That could turn out to be a very optimistic estimate if unemployment remains high and more people seize the educational opportunity to which they have just become entitled. Still another taxpayer trap will be sprung if the President’s proposal to forgive some debt incurred by “overburdened” borrowers is included in the bill.
The federal education takeover is another example of the Democrats’ willingness to use whatever tactics are necessary to advance their agenda to concentrate power in Washington—while they still can.
Then you have your answer. 
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