Politico (again) breaks a major story this morning with its outing of the Dem secret plan that Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation has been warning of for more than ten days:

a former House and Senate leadership aide sent an email sketching out another route to passage. Instead of introducing a Senate bill, Majority Leader Reid could insert the merged health care reform language into a revenue raising House bill already languishing in conference committee. The Senate would pass it and send it to the House whereupon passage, it would go straight to the president’s desk – completely bypassing conference. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

By cutting out conference, this single-bullet scenario eliminates weeks of expected wrangling and would make it possible to pass a bill by the Thanksgiving target so many Democrats are aiming for. Many insiders agree that a conference committee would make that goal next to impossible.

The Democrats are raping the Congressional process to pass ObamaCare:

Read More →

The unsatisfied quenching of the Dem thirst for health care reform continued as the Senate Finance Committee received their vapor score for their vapor bill which had the net effect of discrediting the Congressional Budget Office. U.S. Rep. Shadegg renamed CBO the Cooked Books Office with a stinging post (as in, that’s gotta hurt):

Could you make your family budget look good in a ten-year analysis if you counted ten years of income but only seven of expenditures? That’s what the Congressional Budget Office did in their report on Senator Max Baucus’s health care bill.

Their subpar accounting includes revenue from tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage starting in 2010. However, the bulk of expenditures begin in 2013, when many of the bill’s programs go into effect. It sounds like the CBO has started taking accounting tips from old Enron manuals. How can Democrats be taken seriously if they use ten years of revenue to pay for seven years of expenditures?

Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling weighed in yesterday with his “Where’s the Health Bill?” post in Human Events:

As you read this, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and officials of the Obama administration are in a room at the Capitol rewriting health care policy. The American people aren’t invited. Only a few lobbyists, Obama czars and liberal Senators have even been allowed to see this bill.

The Senate is keeping this bill a secret because politicians were shaken by the August town hall meetings and the rage expressed by the American people toward the president’s version of health care reform. So, to minimize complaints now, the administration and Sen. Reid are making sure citizens are shut out of the process.

Read More →

How sustainable a political position does this sound like: You can’t see the Senate ObamaCare legislative language and we will not tell you how much it costs.

Here is how the San Francisco Examiner put it in their editorial:

When then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promised not to sign major legislation until it had been posted on the Internet for public reading at least five days, trusting voters took him at his word.

Now they know better. Not only is the actual language of what is likely to become the main legislative vehicle for Obama’s signature health care reform not available on the Internet, it hasn’t been given to members of the key Senate committees or the Congressional Budget Office.

Welcome to the Imperial Senate whose leaders view the public with contempt and the elitist attitude that you should not see the legislative language because you cannot understand it. You should not know how Medicare is being cut, or how you are going to taxed, or how the bill change every health plan in the nation.

We know, and we don’t want you to know — is the Democrats position in the Senate. They are shredding that trust, they are stomping it into the ground and burning it in public.

What are the Democrats hiding in that legislative language? What is in it they do not want the public to see? If the health care debate has taught the American public anything, then its the devil is in the details. But the Senate Democratic leadership says: you don’t get to see the details. We, instead have this new thing called the Vapor Bill: don’t read it (we won’t let you) just support it.

Perhaps this is why political analyst Charlie Cook recently said about the Independent voters: “they hate Congress something awful.” If you don’t believe Charlie Cook, then maybe you will believe this nine-month tracking chart by Gallup.

Read More →

What it Means: Vapor bill: A bill which moves through the legislative process in one or more houses of the U.S. Congress without legislative language. The best example of a Vapor Bill is the Senate Health Care Reform bill, which has no legislative language, but has been amended in the Senate Finance Committee. The term Vapor Bill was derived from the word Vaporware, a term coined during the dot-com era to describe all-singing-all-dancing software that was not written yet.

Here is how Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation describes the Vapor Bill:

President Barack Obama’s push for a sweeping health care overhaul is going to be voted upon in the Senate Finance Committee this week and nobody has read the actual bill yet. The Washington Post reported last Friday that “Senate Finance Committee Releases Its Final Text of Health-Care Bill,” yet you click on a link to the “Bill” referenced in the Post article and all you get is a 262 page description of the legislation. There still is no actual legislative language being given to Senators, Staff or the American Public. That is why many are calling it the “Vapor Bill.”

Why it Matters: A bill without legislative language cannot be accurately scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Its impact and effects cannot be judged, nor can it be accurately evaluated without the legislative language. The end of life counseling in the House bill was discovered by reading the bill — as were many other objectionable ideas and issues.

Read More →

Senate staffers, the true veterans, are cynical and truly difficult to shock simply because they’ve seen it all — personal and political implosions, outrages, bad behavior and the worst motivations.

But this, this shocked even the veterans.

What is this? I call it: Vaporbill.

As you may know, in the great dot com internet bubble, vaporware was software that was sold, but that did not exist yet.

Vaporbill is a bill that has no legislative language but that is brought up before the Senate and cloture is invoked on a 100% blank bill.

I am not kidding.

One of the most powerful Senate staffers briefed a group of us on it yesterday morning. It is the next logical step to the HELP Committee’s mark-up of a bill not yet written. Why not take a bill to the Senate floor that does not exist?

Just wait till the READ-THE-BILL first crowd gets a hold of Vaporbill.

Read More →