We, RedState readers, have defeated Harry Reid today and delivered a significant blow to the potential passage of Obamacare. We held every Republican Senator including Olympia Snowe and Richard Burr.

Harry Reid just ran to the Senate floor and cried that he cannot get enough votes to pass the doctors’ bribe to support Obamacare. He blamed the AMA for misleading him.

He might actually want to look to RedState. Our readers have generated hundreds and hundreds of phone calls in 24 hours to pretty much every Republican Senator. Several who had considered voting for cloture backed down.

And now the end run around Obamacare costs has been defeated.

This makes it much more difficult for Obamacare to pass and virtually impossible for it to pass without significant deficit blowing cost additions.

Well done activists!

Call your Senator and Representative — particularly those of you in Republican states and districts — and tell them to oppose S. 1776, a $247 billion doc fix that isn’t paid for and enables the passage of Obamacare. 

Click the link to go to our action center.

Not all the action on healthcare reform is happening in smoke filled rooms. 
 
This week the Senate is considering its next payoff to a powerful lobbying group—a $247 billion package for the American Medical Association.  The funding is not offset and would dramatically increase the deficit.  Harry Reid is betting that the bill will prove politically impossible for most Senators, including Republicans, to oppose as it addresses the number one priority for most doctors over the years—the fact that Medicare doesn’t reimburse them enough.  By considering the “doc fix” apart from overall healthcare reform, he and Max Baucus remove a major cost to that package.  As Senator McConnell said, “This is so transparent. They’re taking this issue out of health care, suggesting that we spend a quarter of a trillion dollars, not pay for it, so that they can then argue, the very next week potentially, that this trillion-dollar health care bill is paid for.” 

Even the media is reporting this is a bribe. Harry Reid will pay off the doctors’ lobby and in exchange the doctors lobby will support Obamacare.
 
The strategy is simple.

• Payoff the docs;
• Make your bill appear to cost less; and,
• Force Republicans to choose between their doctors and the fiscal health of the nation.

 
Now to be fair even many conservatives agree that Medicare’s physician reimbursements are set ridiculously low, amounting to a form of price controls on the system.  And since doctors don’t have to participate in Medicare or take new seniors on as patients, if reimbursements are set too low, it creates access problems.  That has led many to support short-term fixes that are often paid for with other spending reductions as stop-gaps until the overall system could be reformed.  But let’s remember something folks.  Medicare is a government-run healthcare program—the fact that it proves so costly that price controls are adopted is exactly what we’ve been arguing the future holds if Obamacare gets passed.  Making it work right is not something that Republicans in Congress should sell their soul to fix and its certainly not something that should be allowed to enable a government takeover of the health care system. 
 
Republicans need to fight this for what it is—a quarter of a trillion dollar payoff to the AMA to get them to keep supporting Obamacare.  This will be a great litmus test of whether Republican claims of fiscal responsibility have any merit whatsoever.  It’s easy to oppose a nearly trillion dollar stimulus and a nearly trillion dollar health takeover.  It’s hard to tell your doctors back home, in the words of the immortal Meatloaf, that you’d do anything for love but won’t you do that.  But that is exactly how we activists will ever know that Republicans have gotten our message—when they learn to say no to their voters when it comes to spending. 
 
A brief message to you doctors out there, many of you good Republicans.  Seriously, chill out.  Congress is not going to let your reimbursements get cut so stop believing your AMA spam—from the same people who are no doubt enjoying their coffee and donuts over in Rahm Emmanuel’s office.  These people (at least their lobbyists in DC) don’t want you to be free; they want you to be slaves to government in as much as many of you are already to Medicare.  Don’t let that happen on your watch and with your dues and don’t be fooled by this shell game happening in the Senate and presumably soon in the House of Representatives. 
 
Call your Senator and Representative — particularly those of you in Republican states and districts — and tell them to oppose S. 1776, a $247 billion doc fix that isn’t paid for and enables the passage of Obamacare. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised today the final health care bill will include a controversial public option insurance plan, contrary to recent indications by Democratic staffers that such provisions might be eliminated to make the reforms more palatable for moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats.

“We are going to have a public option before this bill goes to the president’s desk,” Reid said Thursday afternoon on a conference call with constituents.

But the Nevada Democrat, who is tasked with reconciling the competing Senate committee versions of the bill, yesterday told reporters the final bill would not be fashioned until the White House and leaders of the Finance and HELP committees had been consulted.

“Once that’s done, we’ll decide jointly as to what should be in that bill,” he said.

On Wednesday, the final bill hinges on consultation with Senate leadership and the President. Thursday, news surfaces that suggests Reid has consolidated the two Senate versions, and opted for the more progressive. There exists only two possible explanations. Harry Reid is either the single most productive member of Congress or he’s circumventing Democratic leaders—and the Ranking Republicans of the HELP and Finance committees—to advance his own agenda.

While Reid’s comments will likely embolden disaffected progressives, they promise to marginalize Democratic Senators Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu and Republican Senator Olympia Snowe.

Some Democratic leaders maintain there’s no “line in the sand” in the health care overhaul, signaling the potential for negotiations with Republicans. Still, Reid’s comments today represent the increasing vulnerability of Democrats to attacks from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party for rejecting the public option.

Highlighting this vulnerability, Daily Kos Founder Markos Moulitsas wrote on Twitter today, “Blanche Lincoln will soon wonder why no one is riding to her rescue, or [cares] about her possibly losing.”

Moderate Democrats must fall in line like Speaker Reid or risk losing deep-pocketed progressive donors and online advocates like Moulitsas.

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Background information available here: the executive summary is that the Inspector General of Americorps was fired earlier this year, under circumstances that appear at best to be part of a whitewash of an administration crony.  Senator Grassley (R) of Iowa has taken an interest in the case, and is making it clear that he’s not going away:

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has blocked the ambassadorial nomination of Alan Solomont, currently chairman of the board of the government agency that oversees AmeriCorps, in retaliation for what Grassley says is the administration’s stonewalling of Congress over documents relating to the firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin. Specifically, Grassley has sought, and been denied, information relating to the White House’s role in the decision to fire Walpin.

Solomont, a major Democratic donor, is chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which includes AmeriCorps. His term ends in October, and President Obama has nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to Spain. The nomination was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week and now moves to the Senate floor — except that Grassley has placed a hold on it, meaning it will go nowhere until the senator’s objections are resolved.

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Harry Reid must really be in danger of losing his Senate seat.

Today Harry Reid sent out a press release to the national media praising Senator Baucus for his new proposal on health care reform.

There’s just one problem. And it could be fatal to Harry Reid’s re-election chances in Nevada.

While Reid was praising Baucus to the national press corp, in Nevada he sent out a press release severely critical of the Baucus plan and said it was a raw deal for Nevada.

Harry Reid wants to have it both ways. He can’t.

Jobs, health care, energy, deficits, Afghanistan, the general war on terror - all these are things that Congress should be working on. Indeed, Democrats are endlessly telling us that whatever priority they have cooked up, must be passed right now! But when the Senate is actually scheduled to be in session - purportedly addressing your concerns - they are delaying official business to let Arlen Specter raise money for his re-election campaign?

Reid announced Friday that the Senate would hold no votes after 3 p.m. Tuesday. His office later said that the scheduling decision was meant to accommodate a long-planned fundraiser that President Obama is headlining in Philadelphia to benefit Specter’s campaign.

The move could delay efforts to finish work on the fiscal 2010 transportation spending bill, which the Senate began considering Thursday…

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As Harry Reid continues his tour of self-destruction, he really shot himself in the foot today.

The Majority Leader of the United States Senate is in a celebratory mood because Ted Kennedy died.

Really.

In an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, he’s asked out Ted Kennedy’s death will affect the healthcare debate. His response:

I think it’s going to help us. He hasn’t been around for some time. We’re going to have a new chairman of that committee, it’ll be, I don’t know for sure, but I think Sen. (Chris) Dodd, (D-Conn.). He has a right to take it. Either him or (U.S. Sen. Tom) Harkin, (D-Iowa), whichever one wants it can have it. I think he (Kennedy) will be a help. He’s an inspiration for us. That was the issue of his life and he didn’t get it done.

Hat tip to Glenn Thrush at the Politico.

As Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas navigates the political minefield of health care reform, the two-term Democrat may be hewing a more conservative course in the wake of a new poll by Public Policy Polling which found her in a dead heat with three potential Republican challengers despite scant name recognition.

PPP, whose sampling of voters skewed Democratic, found that only 36% of respondents approve of Lincoln’s job performance, while 44% say they disprove. In March of this year, the same outfit found that Lincoln maintained an approval rating with a 5-point positive spread.

The three would-be GOP challengers polled included state Senator Gilbert Baker, Huckabee fundraiser Curtis Coleman and Harvard-educated lawyer and U.S. Army veteran Tom Cotton. Among them, Baker performed the best; however a majority of Arkansans—ranging from 78% to 83%—were unsure of their opinions on the three men.

“You couldn’t get a clearer indication that the national momentum is with Republicans right now than a poll showing some guys with single digit name recognition running even with an incumbent Senator,” said PPP’s Dean Debnam.

With Obama’s health care proposal fairing worse in the polls than former President Clinton’s defeated reforms of 1994, Lincoln must take into consideration the consequences of supporting the President’s contentious legislation in a state whose voters ten months ago gave Republican John McCain 59% of the vote.

What’s more, the hemorrhaging of Democratic support to wavering public opinion raises a serious dilemma for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and poses an acute challenge to the President’s legislative agenda, as Democrats today lost their filibuster-proof majority with the death of Senator Ted Kennedy.

Reid must accept the political reality that Lincoln, who previously bucked party leadership on the cap-and-trade legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions and the reauthorization of banking infusion, may be the next casualty in the polarized health care debate.

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Reading this post by Mickey Kaus made me realize something.

The idea of postponing health care reform–until, say, the economy improves– doesn’t seem appealing to many Democrats now. But it might soon. The problem, as Michael Goodwin’s recent column points out, is that the issues waiting in the wings–should health care leave the stage–are even worse, from the Democrats’ political perspective. Cap and trade, immigration legalization, “card check”–these are not what you’d call confidence building appetizers leading up to the main course of Obama’s presidency. Plus the Afghan War! At least a clear majority of the public wants something done about health care….

It’s easy to forget that, even if Obama’s health care effort is bogging down, the effort itself still serves his presidency as a crucial time-waster, tying up Congress and giving him a reason to postpone (or the public a reason to ignore) those other divisive, presidency-killers.

It was not until after 1994 that Bill Clinton really stretched his legs. As much as Clinton had “gays in the military” and “Hillarycare” in the months before the Republican take over of Congress, he’s really known for what? Well, if we’re serious about his legacy — Kosovo, Welfare Reform, Standing Up to Newt, and Impeachment.

Clinton shines as a model of what a Democratic Presidency can be when fighting against Republicans at home and in multinational coalitions abroad. Impeachment has a mixed meaning for him, but among Democrats and Independents, they typically see it as out of control Republicans and a philandering President with the President coming out looking better than the GOP.

Republicans controlling Congress gave Bill Clinton a political opposition from which he could set himself a part. Clinton could be contrasted with the GOP. He could not, pre-1994, viably do that because his party controlled the White House and Congress.

What is Barack Obama’s worst nightmare?

Democrats keeping Congress in 2010.

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See it for yourself below, as Bill Burton, a spokesman for Barack Obama’s White House, says:

I don’t think that Speaker Pelosi was just claiming that people were wearing swastikas [at health care town hall meetings]; people are showing up to events with swastikas, dressed up as Hitler, with signs invoking Nazi Germany, so that’s not something that’s being made up.

Video:

The DC Examiner’s David Freddoso tried to run down this claim, and hit a stone wall:

White House spokesman Bill Burton’s statement on television earlier today that people are showing up at health care town halls dressed up as Hitler was outlandish enough that I had to call the White House and ask if there is anything to substantiate it.

As of this evening, the White House has offered no explanation for this bizarre claim.

By the way, the laugher line of Burton’s interview was the seven-word claim, “We’re trying to have a constructive debate.”

Calling your opponents a dangerous mob of swastika-wearing Hitlers and calling out SEIU thugs to beat them into submissive silence (not to mention setting up an informant tipline by which those who question Obama’s health plan in “casual conversation” can be turned in to the government) is one heck of a way to “have a constructive debate,” there, Bill. Well done.

UPDATE: According to The Hill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has now taken to referring to those who question Obamacare as “evil-mongers.” Classy, Senator.

Wow. Just wow.

New poll in Nevada by Vitale & Associates (July 29-30, 510 LV, MoE +/-4.4%) shows incumbent Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid losing by six points to Sue Lowden, chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party, 44-38, with 10% undecided.

Real Clear Politics has more.

You can consider this an open thread.

One of the most elusive concepts in politics is the notion of a mandate. Presidents love to claim them to bulldoze opposition (”the American people elected me to do this!”), but they can evaporate with astonishing speed, most famously in the case of the backlash against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Court-packing” plan after FDR had won the most sweeping electoral endorsement for any party in a presidential election year since the dawn of the modern two-party system.

If there’s one essential characteristic of a mandate, it’s that the public support behind the president is solid because people know what it is they’re supporting. That’s how conservative presidents like Reagan and George W. Bush got mandates to cut taxes: they ran on a clearly articulated plan, everyone who cared to follow the race knew what the plan involved, and public support didn’t change dramatically once they got into office and their opponents started hitting back with the same arguments they’d used against the tax cuts during the campaign. A corollary is that when Members of Congress voted for the tax cuts, they could do so knowing that the arguments on both sides had been fully ventilated to the public, and the voters wouldn’t turn against them quickly for supporting the cuts.

Barack Obama is now pressing forward on health care on the theory that he was elected on a platform of doing something about “health care reform,” and therefore he has a mandate. Bill Clinton thought the same thing; so did George W. Bush after winning not one but two elections while promising Social Security reform. One can argue about their assumptions (that both Obama and Clinton won because of the economy, and Bush in 2004 because of war, social issues and the economy), and of course it remains too early to predict whether Obama will succeed in getting a health care bill to his desk. But of this much we can be certain: even if he does, his legislative strategy is designed to ensure that the bill is passed without the controversial details being sold to the voters. And if Congressional Democrats follow Obama’s lead, they may find next fall that they can’t hide behind any sort of mandate to justify their votes.

From watching him approach the votes on the stimulus and cap-and-trade proposals and now health care, we have a pretty clear picture of Obama’s modus operandi:

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The morning after President Barack Obama (D-IL) pushed back prime time network programming to make his (weak, unpopular, and factually-challenged) case for an immediate overhaul of the health care system, fellow Democrat and Senate Super-Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) pulled the rug out from under his former incredibly junior colleague, declaring that the Senate would hold the proposed overhaul legislation over the August recess and resume debate on its merits (and the points Senators have had a chance to read) in September.

“This is a complex, difficult issue,” Reid told reporters this morning. His House counterpart, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), disagreed with Reid’s assessment that time to actually read and discuss the multiple health overhaul proposals was in any way a good thing, reiterating her threat to cancel recess in August and keep the House in session if her class Representatives didn’t hurry up and pass the House version of the bill in the next week.

Pelosi also claimed last night that she “ha[s] the votes” to pass the bill (alternately right now and in the next 48 hours). This, of course, begs the question of why she’s so vocally threatening to cancel her class’s the House recess if more Representatives don’t hurry up and support it already.

Admittedly, Ensign’s taken one heck of a drop, but he’s still at least more liked than disliked.

Favorable / Unfavorable
Sen. Ensign (R): 39 / 37 (May 12-14: 53 / 18)
Sen. Reid (D): 34 / 46

Job Approval/Disapproval
Reid: 43 / 55
Ensign: 48 / 45

Jim Geraghty thinks that Reid should try having an affair; I will not be cruel and write the first three things that come to mind*. I will however, note that the Presidential numbers:

Favorable / Unfavorable
Pres. Obama: 49 / 32
Job Approval/Disapproval
Obama: 47% Excellent/Good, 50% Fair/Poor

…seem a bit weak for somebody who won Nevada 55/43.

Moe Lane

*But not the fourth: “Nobody needs shoes that bad.”

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Got it on the first try, huh?

While Senator Ensign’s sudden fall in the polls has gotten the headlines, Harry Reid is even more unpopular. And while Ensign next seeks reelection in 2012, Harry Reid is up next year:

At 39 percent, Ensign’s diminished favorable rating is slightly higher than that of the state’s senior senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid (34 percent), and far above that of the dismally unpopular Gov. Jim Gibbons (10 percent).

“That sure says something, that the guy involved in the adultery scandal is the most popular senior elected official in the state,” Sabato said. “I don’t know what it says, but it says something.”

Now if only the Nevada GOP could find a credible challenger…

There mainstream media and the Left are all over themselves in recent weeks, trying to pin Republicans down on who leads our party. Is Rush Limbaugh our leader? Is it Mitch McConnell? Or is it Sarah Palin, or John Boehner, or Michael Steele, or someone else?

You can rest assured of two things:

1. The only reason they want to know is so that they can figure out whom to destroy, and;
2. It doesn’t matter.

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So.  Back in February the President went to Elkhart, Indiana and made a speech where, as Deceiver.com helpfully reminds us, he included this part:

You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s got to be some accountability and some responsibility, and that’s something that I intend to impose as president of the United States.

Earlier this week, the President took a trip to Las Vegas on the taxpayers’ dime.  His privilege.  He went there to raise money for the wildly unpopular Senator Harry Reid.  Likewise, his privilege. He did this even though the current Governor is quite upset at the President for helping to lose his state about 131 million in revenue so far this year - and upset from afar, because the President didn’t meet with either him or the (Democratic) mayor of Las Vegas.  Once again, the President’s privilege - hey, do you know the etymology of the word ‘privilege?’

It’s Latin: it means ‘private law.’

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via AoSHQ): In 1988, I was a Democrat.  I came from a long line of Democrats; we were a good union household, the old blue-collar generation pushing the new generation into white collar.  When it came to political heroes, it was FDR, Truman, JFK all the way: my parents voted for Carter, and grumbled about Reagan throughout his term.  1988 was my first election, and I went right down to the polling place and proudly voted for Dukakis/Bentsen.  In short, I was a Democratic voter in a Democratic family in a Democratic state in a Democratic region who voted for two Democrats.

And if my Democratic parents had ever caught me calling a Republican First Lady crude names, even by implication, I would have gotten whacked on the ear*.

Speaking Bluntly
Mark Hemingway

[snip]

Three pages in, after lamely trying to establish his bipartisan bona fides by talking up George H. W. Bush, Reid shares this charming anecdote about his early days in the Senate: “[Former Texas senator and vice-presidential candidate Lloyd] Bentsen went on and on effusively about what a quality man President-elect [H. W.] Bush was. Then he paused and said, ‘But watch out for his wife; she’s a b[*]tch.’ I have never had anything against Mrs. Bush, but guided by Bentsen’s crude advice, I’ve always said that our forty-third president is more his mother than his dad.”

Which I guess makes me different from Harry Reid.

Thank God.

Moe Lane

*In fact, my mom would probably still do it.  And I’d sit there and take it, too.  That’s because I was raised to respect women.

I am perilously close to being gobsmacked by this transcript of the Burris/Blagojevich conversation (via Hot Air). I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that there’s enough there to indicate that Roland Burris flat-out lied about not trading favors and money for the Senate seat.  I am not, however, so stunned as to be unable to remind people about this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this…

Hold on: let’s see that video again.

Ha!

…this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and, finally, this.  In short - and may you have as an enjoyable time reviewing those posts as I did - Rod Blagojevich’s pick of Roland Burris for the Illinois Senate was a transparent trap - and Harry Reid and the rest of the Democratic Senate caucus sprung it anyway.  In fact, not being content with springing the trap, Reid and his caucus insisted on making every possible mistake that they could, too.  All because they were afraid.  People will be writing about this act of political revenge fifty years from now, and mocking the Senator from Nevada on every page, too.

Deservedly.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

“The rule is - jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.”
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Fresh from Senator Webb’s decision to play bellwether - or Judas goat? - on the retreat from Gitmo (see also here) we have this latest word on the Matter of Gitmo:

AP source: Democrats won’t fund Guantanamo closing

By ANDREW TAYLOR – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s allies in the Senate will not provide funds to close the Guantanamo Bay prison until the administration comes up with a satisfactory plan for transferring the detainees there, a top Democrat said Tuesday.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo is not dead — only that the funding will have to wait until the administration devises an acceptable plan to handle the closure and transfer the detainees. Obama has promised to close the military prison by January.

[snip]

It appears to be a tactical retreat. Once the administration develops a plan to close the facility, congressional Democrats are likely to revisit the topic, provided they are satisfied there are adequate safeguards.

In light of this news, and in light of Harry Reid’s declaration that the detainees should stay out of this country, I look forward to the White House’s eventual declaration that actually Gitmo’s been sufficiently reformed enough to be used after all. And I look forward even more to all the trained seals who will - through gritted teeth, no doubt - endorse such a wise and prudent move on the part of the President. Then again, what else can they do?

Vote Republican?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.