Less than one week ago, President Obama stood before an assembled audience of hand- picked sympathizers on healthcare reform at the White House and called on Congress to pass his healthcare reform package into law… again.
Having spent his entire year long presidency singularly focused on passing a massive, trillion dollar, federal government takeover of the healthcare industry in America, and failed – Obama had a couple of choices going forward. With an American public now solidly against his healthcare proposal, and his Democrat margins in both houses of Congress now a wee bit slimmer, Obama was forced to choose between either a) substantially altering his healthcare proposal to make it more palatable and bipartisan as he claims is his goal, or b) forging ahead with virtually the same heavy-handed government takeover package and hope to woo skeptical Americans and Democratic lawmakers by the sheer force of his personality.
In Obama’s speech – a rather short one for him of only 21 minutes – he made it clear that he is opting for Plan B. Obama stated:
“No matter which approach you favor, I believe the U.S. Congress owes the American people a final vote on healthcare reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly. Not just for the past year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a super-majority of 60 votes.
And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, that was cast on the children’s health insurance program, that was used for cobra health coverage for the unemployed, and by the way for both Bush tax cuts, all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.”
In other words, he plans to utilize budget reconciliation to pass ObamaCare, which requires only a simple majority in both chambers. And Obama appealed to history, citing five specific examples of major legislation that was passed using reconciliation.
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