Yup. Twenty demands by Republicans at yesterday’s bipartisan Health Care Summit to scrap all existing legislative efforts and start anew. And there were only ten of them there.
Sheesh.
Pat Oliphant nailed it:
My name is Eclectablog and I am a politaholic. I actually took a vacation day yesterday to watch all seven hours of President Obama’s bipartisan Health Care Summit so that I could live-blog it.
In the course of the day, I made a drinking game out of it where everytime a GOPosaur demanded, in one fashion or another, that the President and Democrats start over and scrap all of the work that has been done in the past year to assemble a health insurance reform package to pass out of Congress for the president’s signature.
Sometimes it was an overt request to “scrap the bill”. Other times they used code words like “go step-by-step” or handle it “a piece at a time”. But, no matter how they phrased it, the aim was clear. Obstruct and delay but starting the entire icky process all over again. They are shameless.
One other fun thing to watch was their absolute terror at the prospect of the Democrats using reconciliation (SCARY!) The are so afraid of this that they have taken to refering to it as “the nuclear option”, a phrase once reserved for eliminating the filibuster (sorry, Rachel, “The Tarantino” isn’t working for me.) The fact that Lamar Alexander hit it hard in his opening statement, that Mitch McConnell brought it up again in his opening remarks and that John Boehner finished the day talking about it in his closing remarks should tell Democrats all they need to know: move forward on reconciliation. The GOPosaurs know there’s not a damn thing they can do to stop you if you do.
I’m pretty sure they collectively crapped their drawers when, in his closing remarks, President Obama basically told them that if they couldn’t manage to come to the table with any good ideas for improving the current bills so that they could find in themselves to vote for it, reconciliation would be their only recourse.
Somehow, I find the thought of John Boehner (R-Tanfast) and Mitch McConnell sitting in their chairs in Blair House with their BVDs full oddly comforting.
Twenty times. What a bunch of morans.
I’m just sayin’…
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Digg it, man!
