Patients First goes after President Obama’s broken promises of transparency in the health care reform process:

Presidential candidate Obama promised time and again not to negotiate health care reform behind closed doors, to bring all parties together and to broadcast health care reform negotiations on C-SPAN.

It is truly unfortunate that President Obama did not keep those promises, but instead, chose to meet privately with health care executives, cut a deal with drug firms in secret, and outsourced the drafting of the Obamacare legislation to the extremely partisan, Democrat-controlled Congress.

You know, new broom sweeping clean, cleaning out the Augean stables, generally showing those people in Washington who was who and what was what - and how there was going to be a new boss, with new rules and expectations on behavior. Well, meet the new boss:

During his first nine months in office, President Obama has quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings.

High-dollar fundraisers have been promised access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, according to internal Democratic National Committee documents obtained by The Washington Times.

H/T: The Conservatives. Note that none of this is actually illegal; it’s just… business. This is how things are done in Washington. People willing to give money to politicians will be generally treated better by those politicians than people who are not, all other things being equal. This may disappoint supporters of the President, who (rightfully) may be feeling that they were at least misled about this administration’s intentions, but that’s not exactly the fault of everybody else. Of course, one way of controlling the underlying problem is by encouraging negative feedback mechanisms; for example, transparency…

Since taking office, Mr. Obama has pledged that his administration will be “the most open and transparent administration in history” and has agreed to make public the names of those who sign into White House visitor logs, though a request from The Times for logs that show visits from his top 45 bundlers has so far gone unfilled.

Requests for guest lists to various White House events, such as a recent cocktail reception surrounding the celebration of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ National Hockey League Stanley Cup victory or the Latin music concert last week, have also been denied repeatedly.

Ah. Never mind.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

…to wit, providing fully justified grief to people who really deserve it.  In this particular case he’s making the clock run out on a bill that had some disclosure provisions stripped from it; as has been noted before, there are many ways that an individual Senator can shut things down in the Senate, and Coburn is happy to explore them in the cause of transparency.

The Democrats are of course mad at Coburn for it, because they can’t be mad at the President for making transparency such an important part of his campaign (if not his actual administration), and they can’t be mad at themselves for dumping out the provisions in the first place.  And why did they do it?  The answer is classic Dizzy City:

The top House negotiator, Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., didn’t recall why his side insisted that the Senate drop the transparency provision. But a Democratic aide said later that there is concern that making every report public automatically might cause agencies to be less candid in their dealing with the Appropriations Committee. The aide required anonymity to speak candidly.

I swear, there’s something in the drinking water here.

(H/T: Instapundit)

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I know that there are many people who are incredulous that the U.S. Senate can proceed to a blank, shell health care bill next week — a vapor-bill.

Every person knowledgeable about Senate procedure believes that the Democrats are both arrogant and desperate enough to bring up a blank bill on the Senate flooor, and are planning for it and expecting this unprecedented action by the Democrats.

Why would the Democrats do this? They are under strict marching orders from the White House to complete action on the bill before the opposition by the public manifests itself further, before the Governor elections in New Jersey and Virginia and before the October 15th deadline expires by which time they must use the super-cram-down reconciliation procedures.

Furthermore, how can anyone be against something that does not exist? How do you know that what you say is in the bill really is in the bill. It is a slap in the face to the Senate’s role Constitutional role as the body that cools the passions of the day and is the deliberative body.

The concerns of the American people to slow down and get it right — which are a prominent feature of every health care poll — are being given the middle finger.

How about speed the process up and not tell you what we are doing, is the Senate Democratic response.

How much will the bill cost? Good question. CBO has said repeatedly it cannot accurately score a bill without the legislative language, which does not exist.

So, it is really much worse, proceed to consideration of a bill whose legislative language does not exist and we have no accurate price tag.

Here is an updated and more specific discussion by Brian Darling, of how this will happen.

Every radio talk show host and every citizen should call their Senator now and tell them they want 72 hours to review the actual legislative language before the bill goes to the floor, and they want a CBO Score based on real legislative language.

I suppose there are few of us who hadn’t guessed this, but it would have been nice to have it reported before the administration committed to a bailout:

It’s sure to be a stretch. For the United States to fully recover its investment, the value of General Motors stock will have to reach levels it has never before attained.

“I’m not going to predict it — that’s not my job today,” GM chief executive Fritz Henderson said in a recent interview.

“I don’t know how much we’re going to recover,” a senior Obama administration official said as the company headed into bankruptcy last month.

This uncertainty stems from the difficulty in valuing the 60 percent GM stake that the United States will receive in exchange for the public investment. The government also gets preferred shares and other compensation.

The stake will be worth enough to fully cover the government’s direct investment only if GM’s stock rises above $68 billion. Even at its recent 2000 peak, GM’s stock was worth only $56 billion.

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The subject: This administration’s lack of transparency!

The spokesperson for the Left: Jane Hamsher, of FireDogLake!

The battle:

…called on account of mutual agreement, more or less.

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Last Friday, ten House Republican leaders sent a letter to President Barack Obama. In it, they offered to work across party lines and Congressional divisions with the new president to achieve the latter’s stated commitment “to fiscal transparency and accountability and ensuring that [all] spending commitments are paid for without burdening our children and grandchildren with excessive debt,” and to “slash[ing] earmarks to no greater than 1994 levels and ensur[ing] all spending decisions are open to the public.”

The Republican leaders wrote:

In keeping with these pledges to the American people, we urge you to veto the so-called “omnibus” spending bill passed this week if the Senate fails to reject it.

Like the trillion-dollar “stimulus” spending bill that was rushed through Congress without any Member having read it, the $410 billion legislation passed this week openly defies your commendable objectives of fiscal transparency and accountability. It contains nearly 9,000 “airdropped” earmarks, most of which were not even considered in committee let alone on the House floor as is routine — compared to roughly 4,000 in 1994. …

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Promoted by Jeff

United States Senators are busy people with demanding schedules.  Its understandable if one of the most powerful members of the most powerful legislative body in the nation doesn’t know where her husband is and what he is doing twenty-four hours of every day.  Still, you’d think better than a half-a-year employed by one of your major campaign donors as an illegally unregistered lobbyist… advocating a project you made a point of running against during your last statewide election… might raise a red flag or two.

That’s the reality Senator Debbie Stabenow has faced for the last six months as her husband, Tom Athens, made bank on the payroll of Democratic mega-donor and alleged lothario Jim Papas.  Unfortunately, despite the unending rhetoric about transparency and ethics in the Dem controlled Congress, the Senator who once voted to establish the Senate Office of Public Integrity chose to turn a blind eye to her husband’s criminal actions, putting him, partisan election interests and the family bank account above Michigan residents and campaign promises.

Meanwhile, voters and taxpayers are left with more questions than answers…

How long has Senator Stabenow known her husband was breaking the law, making a living as an unregistered lobbyist?

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With the so-called “stimulus” bill, President Obama has thrown the change he promised under the bus.

On his Change.gov website, Obama promised to “end the practice of writing legislation behind closed doors” - to “restore the American people’s trust in
their government by making government more open and transparent. Obama
will work to reform congressional rules to require all legislative
sessions, including committee mark-ups and conference committees, to be
conducted in public. By making these practices public, the American
people will be able to hold their leaders accountable for wasteful
spending and lawmakers won’t be able to slip favors for lobbyists into
bills at the last minute.”

Just words.

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The claim that President Obama and Speaker Pelosi were going to bring “unprecedented transparency, rigorous oversight and clear accountability” to government, “so taxpayers know how their money is being spent and whether it is achieving results,” has proven to be even less grounded in truth than skeptics like myself initially expected.

Note Exhibit A, at right: the conference report on the $800 billion “stimulus” bill, which would increase America’s debt by an amount equal the 15th largest economy on the planet. House Democrats are already ignoring the 48-hour review period they voted to impose on the bill; now, as you can see in the image, the conference summary (.pdf here) has been marked “confidential” by those same leaders who claimed transparency would be a hallmark of their governance.

If only this was a surprise.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) released the following statement about the “stimulus” and the floor action schedule for tomorrow:

The House is scheduled to meet at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow and is expected to proceed directly to consideration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment conference report. The conference report text will be filed this evening, giving members enough time to review the conference report before voting on it tomorrow afternoon.

Let’s pretend the conference report is to be distributed right now — 5:30pm EST — to House members (in reality, it likely won’t be until later tonight). That would leave 15 1/2 hours, or 930 minutes, for consideration of the 1,434-page conference report before floor action on the bill commences — one and a half pages a minute from now until the morning, with no stops for any reason whatsoever.

Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that the House — including Hoyer himself — unanimously voted in favor of a 48-hour review period for the porkulus before action was taken on it. Is one night really enough time to read for the first time and consider a bill that would borrow and spend an amount of money that, if it were GDP, would make it the fifteenth largest economy in the world?

Of course not. Unfortunately, this type of a move from the supposedly transparency-loving Democrats isn’t exactly unprecedented.

Yesterday, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, submitted a motion that would have instructed members of the House/Senate conference finalizing the “stimulus” bill to make the final conference agreement available online “in an electronic, searchable, and downloadable form for at least 48 hours” before the House and Senate took their final votes on the borrow-and-spend monstrosity.

236 Democrats voted in favor of the motion. Not one voted against it.

Despite this, House Democrats are preparing to ignore the motion they voted for in order to pass this spending bill as quickly as possible.

A House contact told me via email:

[The motion to instruct] is not legally binding – motions to instruct are often ignored by Democratic conferees – but that is primarily because they believe they can get away with doing so in the court of public opinion.

The bottom line is that they all voted for it yesterday, and if they opt to ignore it today by refusing to allow a 48-hour online review before a vote, it is because they are betting that their duplicity will not be noticed by their constituents.

That sounds about right for this crowd.

This morning, a very senior contact within the House GOP informed me that Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Harry Reid (D-NV) met at length last night to put together the House/Senate conference report on the “stimulus” package. Only Democratic conference committee members were informed of the meeting and permitted to attend.

The purpose behind the meeting was apparently to produce a conference report on the over $800 billion borrow-and-spend bill that was entirely free of Republican input, and that could be presented no later than this afternoon in preparation for House and Senate floor action tomorrow.

Ironically, the Democrat-heavy House yesterday voted unanimously in favor of a GOP-sponsored resolution stating that the bill should be made subject to a 48 hour review period by the public before it was finally passed by Congress — something that seems very unlikely to happen, given Democrats’ actions over the last twelve hours.

In a post here on RedState, Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, confirmed reports of the Democrats’ midnight meeting. “Negotiations have already begun under the dark of night,” wrote Price this morning. “In closed room somewhere in the Capitol Building last night, Congressional Democrats and Obama administration officials met with no Republicans present.”

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The Senate is poised to pass its version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act today, setting the stage for a conference to reconcile its differences with the House. Throughout the debate over the economic stimulus bill, there has been plenty of talk about transparency but little done to achieve it. There is, however, another opportunity.

The Sunlight Foundation is spearheading an effort to convince Congress it should put the legislation online for public review at least 72 hours before its final consideration. Sunlight also wants President Barack Obama to keep his campaign promise of posting the bill five days before he signs it into law.

It is unclear when Obama will begin fulfilling his pledge for the five-day public comment period. Two pieces of legislation — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and State Children’s Health Insurance Program — weren’t considered emergencies, yet Obama failed to wait the five days he promised. Spokesman Tommy Vietor gave this lame excuse: “We will be implementing this policy in full soon; currently we are working through implementation procedures and some initial issues with the congressional calendar.”

The only emergency facing the stimulus is the public’s growing dislike for it. Obama and his liberal cohorts know the longer it faces scrutiny, the more likely it is to sink under its own weight.

From the start of the stimulus debate, conservatives have challenged Obama to live up to his transparency talk. House Republican Whip Eric Cantor secured an early pledge from the president to track the stimulus spending in real time. Given the size and scope of the bill, Americans should demand time to scrutinize its contents — before Congress votes and before Obama signs it into law.

Few issues unite conservatives and liberals like government transparency. Obama’s failure to deliver will disappoint not just his harshest critics but also his staunchest allies. Send the White House an email reminding Obama of his promise.

It was Mary Katherine Ham’s article that tipped me to the problem:

Barack Obama’s administration may be promising the “greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch,” and increased transparency over his predecessor, but it seems to be forgoing at least one transparency practice that was routine in the Bush White House— transcripts of the daily press briefing.

It’s been four days since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ first (and widely panned) appearance before the White House press corps, but no transcript, summary, or video of the event has shown up on WhiteHouse.gov. The delay could be forgiven in a less tech-savvy bunch, but given the Obama team’s considerable online skill, the omission of the the transcript is clearly intentional.

The decision to withhold transcripts is not a departure from the Obama Team’s online posture during the campaign, and signals that’s exactly the posture they intend to take for the next four years. Team Obama got a lot of credit for being an active online presence, which indeed it was, but that presence was built for message control, not openness. (My.BarackObama, the campaign’s social networking platform, is a different story, but it was cordoned off from the official campaign material, which was pretty tightly controlled.)

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