Harry Reid's Sleight of Hand

The Heritage Foundation reported late last month, and confirmed yesterday, that Congress is set to ram health care reform through before Thanksgiving, without detail, and without further public input. Apparently, the Honorable Senator Harry Reid has dug up a technical device that will allow him to fall back on the Bill of Attainder/tax on bonuses that Congress shelved earlier in the year as one means of financing the cloaked beast.

“[A] senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told
CNSNews.com that it is ‘likely’ that Reid will use H.R. 1586—a bill passed by
the House in March to impose a 90-percent tax on bonuses paid to employees of
certain bailed-out financial institutions—as a ‘shell’ for enacting the final version of the Senate’s health care bill, which Reid is responsible for crafting.”


This story confirms the four part scenario that would railroad the bill through the Senate using a very unusual closed door procedure to craft the bill with no input from the American people. The four stage plan to pass Obamacare has been publicly
confirmed and is ready to be implemented. . . .


. . . CNSnews.com has confirmed that “the actual final text of the
legislation will be determined by Reid himself, who will consolidate the
legislation approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Committee and the still-unapproved legislation from the Senate Finance
Committee. Reid will be able to draft and insert textual language that was not
expressly approved by either committee.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will
write the final version of Obamacare to be considered in the Senate with no
input from the American people. This is an extremely complex procedure that will not be done in public, or in the form of a hearing, or a public conference committee, and only Senator Harry Reid, some other Senators chosen by Reid and Obama Administration officials will be allowed to read the bill before the Senate debate starts.

If the foregoing is true, we are in a world of so much hurt that there may not be enough band-aids in the world to stanch the bleeding in the public's trust of its elected officials.

Regardless of the substance of Reid's bill, the process through which he plans to get a "fill-in-the-blanks contract," if you will, to the President is so contrary to representative democracy -- especially concerning so large a percentage of our economy -- that a bloodbath at the 2010 ballot box is inevitable (although that's not necessarily a bad thing).

A federal mandate requiring every American to purchase a product (health insurance) that is not tied to any government-issued privilege such as driving, or face a penalty (including potential imprisonment in one House version!), is not only unconscionable, it's constitutionally suspect in so many respects that it certainly cannot withstand a court challenge.

And the smoke-and-mirrors plan to fund the whole debacle is another matter entirely. Even the CBO, while declaring the Senate Finance version deficit-neutral, noted that it didn't have the requisite legislative details to calculate the bill's actual cost or effect on the deficit.

It's time to fire off a few more letters and melt the phone lines again. We must not go gently into this good nightmare.