Coburn Saves America; Dems Cheat Their Faces Off
Yesterday was a fun day to follow the health care debate in the Senate. Upset that his dream of a totalitarian system was spiraling down the drain, avowed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders submitted a massive amendment to turn our entire health care into a single-payer nightmare of bureaucracy, shortage, and squalor.
Kind of like the National Health Care system in Britain, but with Americans dying unattended in filthy hospitals instead of Britons.
Normally, he could just submit his amendment and debate would promptly begin, but that’s not what happened yesterday. See, Senate rules say that every amendment must be read out loud unless all the Senators present at the time agree to waive that requirement, something called unanimous consent. Normally, unanimous consent is granted and things move along. Yesterday, however, Senator Tom Coburn decided not to waive his right to hear the entire contents of Sanders’ 767-page amendment, so the reading began.
Democrats blew their stacks over this. According to them, Coburn’s insistence that Sanders gargantuan amendment be aired publicly was the most obscructive obstruction of obstructiveness since…well…ever! Steam poured out of various Democratic ears until they could drag the allegedly independent Sanders to the floor to withdraw his amendment. Which he did, after three hours (of the projected twelve hours of reading it would have taken). Problem solved, right?
Well, no. The Democrats cheated. The rules say that Sanders had to have the floor in order to pull his amendment but he can’t have the floor until the clerk is finished reading the amendment or until he gets unanimous consent. Neither was true, yet the Senate parliamentarian mistakenly allowed him to pull his amendment. Apparently, a similar mistake happened back in the 80s, so the Democrats gladly declared it a precedent and accepted the mistake.
It’s a shame that the Dems couldn’t have done the honorable thing and asked Sanders to resubmit the amendment so it could be read in full. Instead, they violated their own rules and cheated their brains out to get what they couldn’t get honestly.
You may ask, so what? What’s the big deal if a little rule was broken? Well, I’ll tell you. If the Democrats are willing to break a little rule to get their way, how confident are you that they won’t break all sorts of rules if they get the government-run health care they want? How do you know they aren’t lying through their teeth about the benefits of their bill? After all, we already know they’re dishonest. We already know they’re pushing this bill even though the vast majority of America doesn’t want it. The only question at this point is just how much more dishonest are they willing to be in order to get what many of them have spent their whole lives trying to get?
Other Posts of Interest:
- The ObamaCare Cheat Sheet
- Government Health-Care: Card-Check in Disguise?
- Noted Partisans Shockingly Decide to Be Partisan on Health Care
Category: Health Care Craziness, Our New Democratic Overlords
