If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backs off of building new housing developments in East Jerusalem, his government will fall.

Because the Prime Minister doesn’t want to have his government fall, he won’t back off in response to the Obama Administration’s public denigration efforts.

If the Obama Administration wants to convince the Prime Minister to back off, they will have to use private diplomacy, and throw a sweetener into the deal in order to make it easier for the Prime Minister’s government to survive.

Eric Cantor seems to know this, which is why his advice to the White House to back off in public ought to be listened to. Whether it actually will be listened to is an open question; as the Obama Administration has made clear in a little over a year in office, its actual ability to do foreign policy right is not nearly as great as was advertised during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Law professor and former Tenth Circuit judge Michael McConnell puts the issue succinctly on Speaker Pelosi’s proposed “deem and pass” scheme. I don’t have a WSJ subscription, but fortunately, Michael Cannon does, and he has excerpted the pertinent analysis:

Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”

And because it is apparently necessary, Cannon helpfully refers us to this:

Really, it is embarrassing that Congress has been reduced to needing Schoolhouse Rock lessons.

Michael Franc, meanwhile, points out that there is a potential remedy available to House Republicans; the use of a privileged motion that would preempt debate on the health care reform bill, and be considered immediately by the House. One hopes that someone on Capitol Hill is listening.

I mean, the issue is clear-cut:

Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and assistant to the speaker, said Republicans were trying to deceive the public about the legislation that Democrats were working on.

“They want to send a signal to the American people that the product that is going to come out of the House is the Senate bill, but the fact of the matter is we are amending the Senate bill,” Mr. Van Hollen said. “We are going to get rid of the Nebraska deal. We are going to get rid of other provisions in the Senate bill that shouldn’t have been there.”

If the House gets to amend the Senate bill, then the Senate gets another crack at the bill. Art. I, Sec. 7 of the Constitution demands no less. If Democrats don’t want the Senate to get another crack at the bill, then they cannot amend it, and must pass the Senate bill word for word, comma for comma, period for period, colon for colon, and semicolon for semicolon.

This isn’t difficult to understand, of course. But policy preferences on the part of Congressional Democrats–and for that matter, on the part of the Obama Administration–have trumped Constitutional requirements. That’s pretty shocking, and not a little embarrassing, given our self-styled image as a nation of law, and our reverence for the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

Dan Twining rips the Administration both for its Asia policy, and for misrepresenting the Asia policy of the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration’s Potemkin pretensions to concern and interest in Asia policy ought to be exposed by more pundits and observers. Here’s hoping that Twining started a trend.

Robert Samuelson demolishes them:

How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

You probably think that insuring the uninsured will dramatically improve the nation’s health. The uninsured don’t get care or don’t get it soon enough. With insurance, they won’t be shortchanged; they’ll be healthier. Simple.

Think again. I’ve written before that expanding health insurance would result, at best, in modest health gains. Studies of insurance’s effects on health are hard to perform. Some find benefits; others don’t. Medicare’s introduction in 1966 produced no reduction in mortality; some studies of extensions of Medicaid for children didn’t find gains. In the Atlantic recently, economics writer Megan McArdle examined the literature and emerged skeptical. Claims that the uninsured suffer tens of thousands of premature deaths are “open to question.” Conceivably, the “lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance,” she writes.

Be sure to read the full thing to see the links Samuelson has included for reference.

And remember: We are preparing to base national health care policy on the myths that Samuelson debunks. Is anyone at the White House listening?

An ACORN by any other name, should arouse just as much suspicion.

Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to the health care reform debate? Well, think again:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

Republicans quickly condemned the strategy, framing it as an effort to avoid responsibility for passing the legislation, and some suggested that Pelosi’s plan would be unconstitutional.

“It’s very painful and troubling to see the gymnastics through which they are going to avoid accountability,” Rep. David Dreier (Calif.), the senior Republican on the House Rules Committee, told reporters. “And I hope very much that, at the end of the day, that if we are going to have a vote, we will have a clean up-or-down vote that will allow the American people to see who is supporting this Senate bill and who is not supporting this Senate bill.”

Members of Congress get paid a pretty nice salary in order to take tough votes. Now, apparently, they might be able to earn that paycheck while hiding from the voters.

This is a pretty appalling maneuver, to say the least. The cynicism involved in promoting it is mind-boggling. And while the story seems to indicate that there isn’t that much of a chance that this “self-executing rule” will be used to pass health care reform, the fact that it is even being considered ought to tell people what the Democratic leadership thinks of the democratic process.

Michael Steel, spokesman for John Boehner, points out the following:

. . . Over the past 24 hours, the White House has highlighted the story of an Ohio woman named Natoma Canfield in an attempt to make the case for their government takeover of health care. Yet, ironically, Ms. Canfield would benefit far more from House Republicans’ health care plan than the President’s.

Why? Under the President’s plan, she would theoretically get a subsidy and new insurance rules four years from now, in 2014. That isn’t going to help her now. Our plan immediately puts more money into state high-risk pools, or establishes them in states where they currently do not exist (the President’s plan does, too, but we do more – and we forbid waiting lists for those pools. The White House plan does not.)

So I see Paul Krugman has thrown his lot in with the neoconservatives who disdain multilateral institutions and prefer bellicose unilateralism when they confront a frustrating international situation.

–Dan Drezner. As I have written before, Krugman deserves his Nobel Prize. But it is exceedingly difficult–at best–to take him seriously as a pundit, or a would-be policymaker. More justly-earned criticism from Free Exchange.

Andrew Biggs critiques the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’s own critique of the Ryan fiscal roadmap. Key passage:

What’s a little disappointing is that the Congressional Budget Office report on Ryan’s plan has been available since late January, so there’s no need to rely on outdated Social Security Administration analyses of older versions of Ryan’s proposals.

Well, yes there is, if one wants to attack Paul Ryan for partisan purposes. But that’s about the only excuse.

As the title to this post makes clear, my impressions of Peter Graves were more shaped by Airplane! than they were by Mission: Impossible. Airplane! is, in fact, a not-so-guilty pleasure in my family, and Peter Graves helped make it a tremendous success. His deadpan approach to comedy was brilliant, and the decision to include him in the movie was utterly inspired. He helped make Airplane! a success, and in doing so, helped give me and my loved ones a lot of laughs, and a lot of happy memories.

He lived a long and full life, but it ought to go without saying that we would have liked to have had him around for much longer.

R.I.P.

I am not a neoconservative myself, but that doesn’t stop me from being displeased over the way in which neoconservatives have been attacked and parodied for purely political purposes. It is one thing to take on the neoconservatives and their vision of the world in a straightforward and honest manner, and to use criticism to sharpen neoconservative thinking so as to ensure the most vibrant, and intellectually stimulating foreign policy discussions possible. It’s quite another to simply make the movement into one giant piñata for the purpose of thrashing it, thereby gaining partisan advantage.

Fortunately for the neoconservatives, Steven Cook has come out with a more honest appreciation. He is not a neoconservative either, and he criticizes the neoconservatives for various issues, but at least he is a good faith critic. And he acknowledges that the image of neoconservatives as a group that has gotten everything wrong simply doesn’t match the reality. As Cook writes, the neoconservatives got Syria, Iran, and democracy right, and they ought to be given credit for that.

The jury should still be out on the neoconservatives; not enough time has passed in order to properly judge their legacy. But in many ways, the neoconservatives have gotten a bad rap, and the bad rap has come from people who want to be able to profit politically from the perceived misfortunes of the neoconservatives. That’s unfair and dishonest, and it only serves to degrade the general foreign policy debate. Kudos to Steven Cook for resisting the temptation to just mindlessly pile on the neoconservatives. Hopefully, his writing on this issue will serve as an example to the rest of the punditocracy.

My friend, Neil Stevens, has just launched his new polling website. I plan to make it a regular websurfing stop, and so should you. Political junkies should and will find a lot at the site to satisfy their cravings.