An admission from the Congressional Budget Office: Factor in the “doc fix”, and one finds that $59 billion is added to the deficit over the next ten years.
Remind me why anyone is supposed to think that the health care reform bill before the House is the best bill that we can get.
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Budget Deficit, Congress, Democrats, Doc Fix, Economic Ignorance, economy, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, National Debt, Obama Administration
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In the end, Obama will likely have to face the fact (or suffer the consequences of refusing to face it) that the Israeli-Arab conflict is impervious to Israeli concessions. There is a fairly good reason for this, which is usually lost in the firestorm of pontification that greats anything and everything to do with Israel. It is simply this: the Israeli-Arab conflict was begun by the Arabs, and it can only be ended by the Arabs.
Democrats are ecstatic about the score given to the health care bill by the Congressional Budget Office. One wonders why, given a close analysis of the bill and the score. Let’s turn the mike over to Jeffrey Anderson:
For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs. First, it includes 2010 as the initial year. As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time. Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009. But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare. If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.
March 18, 2010 – 11:40 pm
At the very least, it appears to be worth a shot. As mentioned, unlike the case in Marshall Field, an actual Constitutional provision–Art. I, Sec. 7–is implicated. As Jonathan Adler notes, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may be willing to analogize any challenge to the one that was issued in Public Citizen, thus causing it to rule the same way that it did in Public Citizen. But since the Supreme Court may well think differently, and since there is ample cause for it to think differently, a Constitutional challenge to the use of the “deem and pass” rule should very much be found to be on the table.
Of course, if we could just have a straight up-or-down vote in the House on health care reform, perhaps we could avoid any litigation altogether. But that apparently is not going to be a luxury we can enjoy, now is it?
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Congress, Constitutional Law, Deem And Pass, Democrats, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Administration, Republicans, Supreme Court
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So, there may be no vote on the health care package this weekend because House Democrats suddenly decided that they want to wait for the CBO score? I don’t know about anyone else, but I read this as meaning that the House Democratic leadership believes–the pledges of “yes” votes from the likes of Dennis Kucinich notwithstanding–that they don’t have the votes.
Let’s turn over the mike to Yossi Klein Halevi:
Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly.
Anyone really all that surprised to read this?
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.”
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Congress, Deem And Pass, Democrats, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Administration, Politics, Republicans, Self-Executing Rule, Senate
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March 17, 2010 – 12:04 am
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.
