Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats operated under a moral and ideological compul sion to pass ObamaCare — consequences be damned.
The late conservative columnist Robert Novak liked to say that God had put Republicans on the Earth to cut taxes. Democrats believe they were put on Earth to nationalize health care. It doesn’t matter if the legislation to do so is unpopular; if it is fiscally unsustainable and will increase insurance premiums; if it can only pass on a party-line vote, in contrast to other major pieces of social legislation like Social Security and Medicare.
For all their evocations of the American people, Democrats were talking to themselves much of Saturday. They had their own private hero, John Dingel, the old Michigan bull who has plugged for socialized medicine across the decades of his long career. They had their self-congratulatory watchword, “history.” And they took a vote sure to be most pleasing to their own caucus — putting aside the 1 out of 7 Democrats who voted “nay.”
The vote was indisputably a victory for “Iron Nancy.” The House speaker has now passed two sweeping, politically perilous pieces of legislation by extremely narrow margins, with cap-and-trade garnering a mere 219 votes and health care 220 (218 is necessary for passage).
Skittish in front of the cameras, Pelosi seems on the verge of a breakdown during most press availabilities. But she’s a true believer who has an indomitable will and knows how to inspire, cajole and threaten her caucus into doing her bidding. She’s adept at doing well those things that shouldn’t be done at all.
As of a few weeks ago, the conventional wisdom was that the Senate would go first. That would keep the House from voting for unpopular measures that might not become law. The Senate would pass a relatively moderate bill, cheaper than in the House and without the public option.
But as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid struggled to get off the mark, Pelosi took matters into her own hands, passing a full-on, uncompromising $1.2 trillion (at least) bill including the left-for-dead public option. The subtext of her celebratory press conference late Saturday, where her fellow Democratic leaders hailed her for her imminent ascension to the ranks of all-time great speakers, was, “See, that’s not so hard, is it Harry?”
But Harry’s institution is built to be balky and deliberative, and he has no margin for error. For him, the House should be as much a warning as a prod. President Obama wanted a bill out of the House and Senate by August. Instead, it’s November and only the House has acted, in a partisan vote with Democrats picking up only one idiosyncratic Republican and losing 39 of their own.
Pelosi could (just barely) afford to lose those votes, but Reid needs every single one of his members if he’s going to hold the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. Part of Pelosi’s impetus in moving first was to act before the public had more of a chance to fasten on unpopular features of the bill and before her moderates became even more nervous after the Democratic debacles in New Jersey and Virginia.
In contrast, the Senate calendar inexorably pushes Reid toward next year. The bill is not going to get more popular over time, and the longer Democrats are obsessed with passing it, the longer they seem disconnected from the public’s top concern: a 10.2 percent unemployment rate. Time will only serve to undermine the serial dishonesties on which the bill is shakily built.
Saturday dramatically exposed one of them. President Obama has always insisted that the bill doesn’t fund abortion. How surreal then, that Pelosi had to accommodate fellow Democrats led by Rep. Bart Stupak (Mich.) who wanted to apply the Hyde amendment prohibiting federal funding of abortion to the bill. Pro-choice Democrats threw a fit protesting the removal of the abortion funding that was supposedly never there. No fewer than 64 Democrats joined Republicans in handily passing the Hyde provision.
That language will be just one stumbling block going forward, not to mention the sort of massive tax increases and Medicare cuts usually associated with bipartisan deficit-reduction measures. House Democrats now own those cuts and tax hikes, whether they ultimately make it into law or not.
On Saturday, Pelosi got her majority to work her will only by putting into play the question of whether it will long be a majority. comments.lowry@ nationalreview.com