Bart Breaks

There is a fable that exists in many versions, one version of which is attributed to Aesop, the most famous fable teller of the ages. All of the variations follow this common theme: someone finds a deadly snake in a bad way (frozen, injured) along the way, and taking pity on it, nurses it back to well-being, whereupon the snake rewards its benefactor by biting him. “You ingrate,” howls the snake’s Good Samaritan, “I helped you and you bite me!”

“Fool,” the snake replies, “you knew I was a snake. What did you expect?”

In like manner, I was disappointed, but not shocked, to see Bart Stupak change his vote in approving the Senate’s bill last Sunday night. His long, principled stand-off to assure the Hyde Amendment’s abortion provision was preserved in the House changes to the Senate bill was a slender reed in the end as the vote rolled toward its deadline and Obama offered him an executive order to salve his conscience and cross over to the dark side.

Like the one who picked up a snake, I knew Stupak was a liberal Democrat from the heavily unionized Michigan 1st Congressional District. While his Kabuki imitation of his reservations about the House bill abortion provisions fooled me for a while, I also knew he was an ardent supporter of the rest of the bill. And, most importantly, he is a politician who loves the power and prestige of his House seat even though it has the annoying constitutional distraction of having to reapply for the job every two years.

So, while I’d hoped his politics wouldn’t rise above his principles, I probably deserved to get bitten. It wasn’t the first time. Joe Lieberman, whose career was resurrected by Connecticut Republicans after the Democrats threw him under the bus, comes to mind. Now an “Independent”, he continues to faithfully vote with the Democrats with a tip of his hat to the Republican caucus.

I emailed Stupak after his vote to voice, without rancor, my disappointment with his change of heart. The fact that his website’s pull-down for the writer’s “state” only listed one – Michigan – wasn’t a good sign that my email would survive the delete button. And that was further confirmed by the immediate bounce email I received after clicking “Send”: “Since you are not a resident of Michigan, I will not respond to your email.” So? I suspect his constituents don’t rate much more than a form letter.

Stupak knows, or certainly ought to know, that the law trumps a presidential directive or executive order. If he was truly concerned about the wording in the Senate bill, why would he accept a meritless substitute – like a modern Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of stew?

Better still, if Obama was so willing to show good faith by writing an executive order to double down on Stupak’s concerns, why wouldn't the President just ask Prime Minister Pelosi to put the language of the executive order in the House bill corrections?

We all can guess the answer. Because an executive order has no weight. Rep. Gene Taylor (D-MS) says he warned Stupak before the vote that this executive order can be erased by another executive order at any time. What a president can do he can also undo. Executive orders, Taylor said, “have the strength of gelatin and the life expectancy of a fruit fly.” Even if Obama were willing to enforce his executive order -- a big if for the most openly pro-abortion president in history – no court in the land will look to it for guidance. The court will look only to the law, whose Senate language wasn’t as good as Stupak wanted, thanks to being watered down by Ben Nelson in return for the “Cornhusker Kickback.”

The only merit in the executive order, it would seem, was to provide Stupak cover. Perhaps a second reason for the charade of an executive order was to bring over to the dark side enough other anti-abortion holdouts to assure that the Democrat vote majority exceeded one vote. That way, no Democrat could be accused of being “the one vote” that put the House vote over the line. As it turned out, the House approval of the Senate bill passed 219 to 212 with three votes more than needed. For all intents, four votes – Stupak’s and three of the six remaining congressmen in original “Stupak Dozen” he persuaded to quit their stand – were “the ones” that passed the bill last Sunday night.

There may have been a third reason for Stupak to accept a worthless simulacrum instead of a meaningful rewrite of Ben Nelson’s perfidy. Two days before the historic vote, the Obama administration awarded $726,409 in grants to three low-volume regional airports in Stupak’s district. It seems like such a small lagniappe for such a monumental vote change that perhaps there’s no connection.

But then there could have been no connection in Obama’s appointment to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals of Scott Matheson just hours before his then-wavering brother, Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT), and nine other fence-straddlers would visit the White House for an evening of compelling discussions on the merits of ObamaCare marinated in arm-twisting.

And there could have been no connection between the switch on the day before the House vote of two supposedly “undecided” California Democrats, Reps. Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa, to “yes” after the U.S. Department of Interior announced that it was increasing water allocations to their districts in the Central Valley of California, a region that depends on these allocations to support local agriculture and jobs. The region had recently been starved for water and as a result unemployment had soared. To their constituents, who would vote to retain their services in congress this fall, Cardoza and Costa seemed to have reproduced the miracle at Cana.

There could have been no connection in these strange coincidences, but we live in a time when politics and cynicism are becoming synonyms.

Consider a different time before the SOP of today’s Democrat nomenklatura became the norm for legislating. Freshman Henry Hyde, a Republican, arrived in 1976 to a House of Representatives that was dominated by Democrats. The openly pro-life Hyde reached across the aisle to like-minded Democrats to author the Hyde Amendment – a measure barring the use of certain federal funds to pay for abortions. Regardless of how one feels about abortion itself, the use of taxpayer money to pay for it is an entirely different issue. The Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Bill Natcher, a highly respected Democrat, covered the backs of Hyde and his Democrat colleagues to make sure the amendment was not gutted by opponents working behind closed doors – today’s congressional modus operandi – but would instead be debated in the light of day with no side deals. Thus, the Hyde Amendment became law, and despite numerous attempts to weaken it down through the years, it has withstood those attempts with bi-partisan support.

That tradition continued last November when the Stupak Amendment brought together 64 House Democrats and all of the House Republicans to assure that the Hyde Amendment would survive in the contentious health reform debate. For months during those negotiations Stupak withstood abuse and open ridicule from his own party. His well-being and that of his family were threatened by pro-choice groups that can’t seem to distinguish legalizing behavior from forcing taxpayers to pay for it.

As March 21 approached, the Pelosi-Obama tag team went to work on Stupak. He was once a street cop and later a state patrol officer. Injured in the line of duty and later medically retired from law enforcement, I believe Stupak is no coward. As a cop he faced worse than the likes of Pelosi and Obama on the mean streets of Michigan. Yet his willingness to abandon a hard fought stand for a presidential flimflam is bewildering even to jaundiced congress-watchers like me.

A faithful, practicing Catholic, Stupak said in an interview last fall that he hadn’t anticipated how big the abortion issue would become during the healthcare reform debate, nor had he figured to find himself a household name. He certainly didn’t expect to be the bull’s eye for passing sweeping legislation for which the only bipartisanism was its opposition and the only partisanism was in its support. That’s a lot of pressure.

At some point in our lives, however, circumstances will force us all to ask ourselves what we stand for. In a society that stands for nothing and falls for everything, conviction is becoming an endangered species. For sure, Pelosi has conviction. She repeatedly said that she was willing to lose the House and thus her Speakership in order to pass healthcare reform. What was Stupak willing to lose? Apparently nothing. When offered a way out that saved face, he took it.

“One man with courage makes a majority” Andrew Jackson said.

Apparently Bart Stupak wasn’t that man.

Slaughtered

“In THAT direction,” the Cheshire Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like. They're both mad.”

“But I don't want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.”

“How do you know I'm mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn't have come here.”

Maybe that explains it. To be a Democrat congressman, ignoring the polls and your constituents’ wishes, knowing that every Representative and a third of the Senate will face their electors this fall, you must, as the Cheshire Cat said, be mad – or you wouldn’t have come to congress.

We’ve seen this week a political Wonderland being played out where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are and where a healthcare bill is so toxic that “lawmakers” will resort to pretend that they aren’t voting for it by … voting for it.

That is precisely what New York Democrat Louse Slaughter, the Chair of the House Rules Committee, has hatched in the eponymous rule that comically describes the political slaughter that awaits the ovine House members who intend to use it. But the House Dems are determined to march on – for many of them, to their doom in November. One House member – Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN) – who chose to retire rather than face the voters this fall, in a final display of what he thinks of the folks back home who oppose the bill, switched his vote from no to yes.

Here’s how the so-called Slaughter Solution works. Under her death-defying procedural hoodwinkery, the House will vote only once on the reconciliation corrections, but not on the underlying Senate bill. If those reconciliation corrections pass the House vote, Slaughter’s rule says that the Senate bill is “hereby deemed” to have been approved by the House—even without a formal up-or-down vote on the actual words of the Senate bill.

Having thus voted, the Democrats would send the Senate bill to the White House for Obama’s signature and the reconciled bill would go to the Senate for its approval. Stay with me here. The Dems would by their actions declare themselves to simultaneously be for and against the Senate bill in the same vote. These guys have to be as mad as the Hatter and the Hare or the laughable John Kerry who voted for the Iraq war before he voted against it.

Hey! I’m not making this stuff up.

The Slaughter rule may be clever, but it isn’t constitutional. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s also the opinion of a number of constitutional scholars who have weighed in on the matter, one of whom, Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation, has already written a “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” which he will file as soon as the rule is used, naming Obama, Eric Holder, and other cabinet members as defendants.

Slaughter’s two-votes-in-one sleight-of-hand is a bald-faced violation of the plain language of Article I Section 5 and Section 7 of Constitution, whose purpose was clearly intended to make Congress accountable for the laws they pass. Pelosi’s stooge, Slaughter intends that the House members avoid accountability by providing them cover that they are not on record for having voted for the Senate bill.

Article I Section 5 of the Constitution says:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy; and the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.

Article I Section 7 of the Constitution says:

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively.

If one chamber of Congress doesn’t like the provisions of a bill passed by the other, representatives of both chambers meet as a conference committee to reconcile their differences. Only after both houses of congress have re-voted on the exact same bill – not one jot or tittle of which may differ in the House and Senate versions – can the bill go forward for the President’s signature. The Slaughter gimmickry fails that requirement because the Senate votes only on the amendatory bill. The House voted on one bill with one vote and the Senate will vote on another with one vote, but no single bill passed in both house in the exact same form.

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." The Court made a similar ruling in a 1983 case. Challenges to the Slaughter chicanery will be based on these precedents.

And comments made this week by Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi that similar procedures have been used before are delusional. The Supreme Court has said in past cases that repetition of an unconstitutional process does not make it constitutional.

There seems to be enough sufficiently credible constitutional questions to pique the interest of the Supreme Court. The Constitution and the American people will otherwise be the losers.

Obama may regret lecturing the Justices on the law in his January SOTU polemic.

SOTU Meets SCOTUS

In the enumeration of the duties of the President, Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution says:

“He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient ...”

In the years since George Washington gave the first State of the Union address (although it wasn’t called that until FDR used the term in 1934) it has remained each President’s choice to decide how to comply with this constitutional requirement.

Both Washington and Adams gave their addresses in person. Jefferson, undoubtedly aware that this constitutional provision was modeled after the British Monarch’s Address from the Throne, thought it too “kingly” for the executive to stand above the legislature and lecture it. His 1801 SOTU was dispatched in writing to Congress to be read by a clerk.

Jefferson’s precedent continued for 112 years until Woodrow Wilson, who felt no one could ever hear enough from him, including Wilson himself, resumed the SOTU delivery in person, and it has continued regrettably so since 1913.

I say “regrettably” because the SOTU has morphed from a marginally important housekeeping formality the Founders seemed to have intended into a “political pep rally” as Chief Justice John Roberts characterized it this week following a speech to the University of Alabama Law School.

Answering a law student's question about Obama’s SOTU criticism of the court, Roberts answered, “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up — literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering — while the court, according to the requirements of protocol, has to sit there expressionless, I think, is very troubling."

Even more troubling than Obama’s pontifical intrusion into the affairs of SCOTUS was that his assertions were patently untrue. The Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission did not overturn "a century of law" as Obama, apparently untroubled by the First Amendment, contended nor did it confer a new entitlement on foreign corporations in U.S. elections. The FEC is renowned for overreach, and this time got its hands slapped.

I was also troubled by the televised image of Charles Schumer, snarling and clapping almost in the face of the implacable justices. It bordered on intimidation – hardly the fodder for a Channel One civics class.

Obama isn’t the first President to have his panties wadded by the Supreme Court. In the tumultuous election of 1800 denying John Adams a second term as President, Adams used the interregnum to engage in judicial mischief leading to the landmark Marbury v. Madison of 1803. Thereby, Chief Justice John Marshall established the power of the heretofore neutered Court, making it the final arbiter of the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and state legislatures.

President Andrew Jackson, a famous Indian fighter and an unrepentant Indian hater, was directed by the Court to consider the relationship between the United States and the Cherokees (who lived mostly in Georgia) as a relationship between nations in the case of Worcester v. Georgia. Jackson famously said, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" Old Hickory wanted the Cherokee land because, among other things, gold had been discovered. His actions set in motion Indian removal which his successor, Martin van Buren, would carry out in what has become known as The Trail of Tears, one of the most sordid events in American history.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who considered the American presidency a notch above monarchical, attempted to pack the Court with six additional justices who would be more favorably inclined towards his New Deal adventures than the Court’s existing nine incumbents. His shenanigans failed in Congress and proved a political disaster for FDR by splitting the Democrat Party, reawakening the opposition, and undermining his second-term agenda.

As a life-long student of history, I believe that there has never been a generation like those men who engaged in the political debates of the 1780s and created the U.S. Constitution – one of the most remarkable documents in government, perhaps matched only by one signed in a meadow at Runnymede in 1215, the Magna Carta. They were intellectual giants compared to the political pygmies of both parties today. With the exception of Washington, who was poorly educated, most of the Founders were university-trained, able to read and write Greek and Latin fluently, and knowledgeable of all forms of government since recorded time.

In the late summer of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were hard at work word-smithing the document. We know from Madison’s notes of the convention that on August 27 delegates discussed possible friction between the judicial branch and the other two.

John Dickinson of Delaware moved to insert in Article III the words "provided that they [Justices] may be removed by the Executive on the application by the Senate and House of Representatives."

James Wilson of Pennsylvania, reflecting on an incident that happened in the British Parliament, worried that "judges would be in a bad situation if made to depend on every gust of faction which might prevail in the two branches of our government."

Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia opposed the Dickinson motion for the removal of federal judges fearing "weakening too much the independence of the judges."

Dickinson countered that he "was not apprehensive" that the other branches "constructed on such different principles, would improperly unite for the purpose of displacing a judge."

Dickinson was wrong. On January 27, 2010 a bloviating president provoked a puerile reaction among the Senate and a House of Representatives that did indeed "improperly unite for the purpose of displacing" Supreme Court justices. They physically united to jeer their disrespect for a co-equal branch of government.

When questioned by another Alabama student about the attendance of SCOTUS at SOTU speeches, Chief Justice Roberts answered, “I’m not sure why we’re there.” Nor am I. Other than respect, which certainly wasn’t returned in kind in January, there is no statutory reason for them to be there. Therefore, since the Obama SOTU of 2010 gave new meaning to the term “bully pulpit,” I believe the Court should follow the example of their colleague Justice Antonin Scalia, who hasn’t attended these charades in years, and stop going.

I also think the Chiefs of Staff for the Armed Services, who are compelled to be political capons in events like these, should also avoid the political dramaturgy that SOTU has become.

It might not be a bad idea to carry this further and recommend that the 435 Representatives and 100 Senators stay home where they won’t feel compelled by party politics to spring to their feet and bray like jackasses anymore.

And if a future president, including the current one, can’t accommodate the low regard that Jefferson held for the State of the Union address, and is instead convinced that the Republic would somehow become unhinged without his annual Sinaitic emanations, he could still come.

It wouldn’t be the first time a politician postured for C-SPAN cameras in an empty chamber.

I Am the President

Obama’s decision to ignore polls, town hall demonstrations, and lost elections, and push through his massive remaking of American healthcare is yet another indication that his view of what it means to be President of the United States is very different from that of his predecessors and indeed the writers of the Constitution.

At last month’s Blair House summit of constitutional equals, there was one person present who clearly considered himself superior to the others. Twice Obama asserted an exceptionalism based on the fact that he was the president. "There was an imbalance in the opening statements, because I'm the President. And I didn't count my time in terms of dividing it evenly," he said.

Indeed.

In other words, the president doesn’t have to play by the rules.

I found Obama’s calling his constitutional peers by their first names both repugnant and revelatory of his elitist self image. I would have expected a man of his ethnic background and social experience to be more sensitive to the subtle condescension implied by referring to Mitch, Lamar, John, Nancy, and Harry instead of their honorific titles. I wondered how he would have reacted if one of his assembled peers had referred to him as Barack instead on Mr. President.

His behavior in so widely a watched public discourse between members of Congress and a president betrayed an attitude, in my opinion, that at a minimum demeaned the dignity of the men and women seated in a square (so there would be no symbolic head of the table) but it may even have bordered on the same racist mindset that compelled my parent’s generation to refer to a black man as “boy” regardless of his age.

Obama seems not to understand that the 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to write the Constitution started (as Article I) with the Legislature, more particularly, with the House of Representatives – the people’s chamber. Only after defining the function of the House and then the Senate did they get around to drafting the role of the Executive in Article II and the Judiciary in Article III.

That is significant because most writers compose the most important issues first and move on to the less important, and Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention reveal the assembly was more concerned with the role and scope of Congress than that of the president. In other words, in those 55 pairs of eyes, the president wasn’t all that important despite the fact that everyone present knew that the presiding officer of their convention, sitting mute throughout those proceedings, would be the first president of the United States.

Washington was the only president in the history of this country to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College. While he couldn’t have known that, certainly his successors do – or should.

When it was suggested that George Washington attend his inauguration in a gold satin suit, he appeared instead in a conservative (if not common) brown wool outfit with silver buttons embossed with the American eagle.

When the first Congress struggled to find a title by which to address the new president, Washington fobbed off “Your Highness” and “Your Excellency” and chose instead “Mr. President.” (Jefferson celebrated his inauguration by having lunch at his boarding house in Washington, for which he had to wait in line. Such were these men.)

In many revolutions, its hero sets himself up in a perpetual public role. Not so with Washington, who served two terms and retired to his farm in Virginia, thereby setting a precedent that lasted for 150 years until an egoistic FDR chose to run for a third term, which killed him.

If modern presidents want to model themselves after a predecessor, there can be no better than Washington. Obama, take heed.

I recently watched Tiger Woods’ tortured televised acknowledgment that fame had caused him to lose his moral compass. "I felt I was entitled. I had worked hard. Money and fame made me believe I was entitled. I was wrong and foolish. I don't get to live by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me," he said.

Tiger Woods’ real addiction was neither women nor sex. He became addicted to the narcotic of power and the sense of entitlement that deludes its victims. He believed his own baloney – the same Siren’s Song that led Bill Clinton into his dalliances with women. “Power,” Henry Kissinger said, “is the greatest aphrodisiac.”

Power seems to have ensnared Obama in its narcotic embrace. It’s a heady experience for a young black man with almost no national political experience to be swept into the highest office in the land, if not the world, against all odds. It could delude him into thinking that destiny, not a republican election, put him in the position he is in, and therefore he is beholding to no one.

Power seems to have blinded Obama to the fact that two wars and the serious economic recession confronted him on the first day that he held office and seduced him instead into creating a crisis out of the non-crisis that healthcare was.

“I am not the first president to tackle health reform but I am determined to be the last”

Power seems to have endowed Obama with a sense of superiority that he and only a few other chosen ones can grasp the arcane threat that healthcare poses to the very existence of American society.

“[Healthcare] is a complicated issue; it easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship, and misrepresentation and misunderstanding….The American people want to know if it's still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future.”

Thus, the reason that the American people, many of whom voted for Obama, oppose his program to save their recently endangered healthcare system is that they aren’t bright enough to understand the problems and they aren’t capable of looking out for their own interests or prepare for their own futures.

Power seems to have anointed Obama with an almost messianic quality to know what is “right” for the country.

“I don?t know how {pushing healthcare reform through as a reconciliation bill] plays politically, but I know it’s right.”

Power is a Mephistophelian delusion to ignore that there are consequences to forgetting that America is a 50-50 country, if not a center-right one, and that political survival depends on listening to the voice of the people – however much the message isn’t what a president wants to hear. .

“I won.”

So much for bipartisanship.

OB's Blair House Blab-a-thon

Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That could as well describe the schizophrenic Obama White House

The same Obama who campaigned that he would rise above partisan politics has become more polarizing in the eyes of some (including Gallup) than George Bush. The same Obama who signaled in his SOTU that he would pivot to focus on jobs and the economy has now re-pivoted to continue to push ObamaCare.

In the run-up to this week’s summit, polls showed the American people are opposed to the Senate version of the healthcare bill, opposed to using reconciliation to ram something through, and opposed to “big fix” solutions that produced the likes of Medicare and Medicaid in the salad days of the Great Society.

The summit found the approval rating of Congress hovering at 18% and Obama’s approval rating at 44% compared to a 55% disapproval rating. Approval for President Obama’s handling of health care is just 36%, according to the latest CBS News poll. Even the Obama girl, Amber Lee
Ettinger, who cooed her adoration for candidate Obama in 2008, recently announced that she’s turning away from him. “I give him a B-,” she said.

Ignoring the polls, town halls, and recent election results, Pelosi asserted at this week’s summit that the American people can’t wait any longer for Congress to pass healthcare reform. "Baby steps don't get you to the place where (the American) people need to go," Obama said. Reid is reconsidering the public option that his own senate caucus has rejected.

Are these people in contact with a parallel universe? Where are they getting these ideas?

"We don't do comprehensive well," Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander said at the health summit. "We've watched the comprehensive, economy-wide, cap and trade. We've watched the comprehensive immigration bill ... we've watched the comprehensive healthcare bill. And they fall of their own weight."

I didn’t have seven hours to waste watching a summit whose outcome was almost predetermined when Obama published his healthcare bill on the Internet, essentially driving a stake in the ground that this would be the starting point for compromise. Yet the little TV coverage I did watch, and the radio talking heads I listened to, and the news I’ve read since the summit showed it was little more that an adult version of “King of the Hill” that little boys play. Anyone proposing a material departure from the presidential version of the health bill was chastened by Obama as if he were a nattering nanny, not someone interested in other people’s ideas.

Whenever Obama talks about healthcare reform (or any kind of reform, for that matter) it becomes obvious that his goal isn’t expanded healthcare coverage, but rather expanded federal government control.

Obama claims his interests are expanding coverage and reducing costs. Yet, he opposes allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, even though it would break the state monopolies that insurance companies have within a state and bring down costs by opening their markets to all comers. He only wants them insured on his terms. He will determine the "fairness" of their coverage.

Even though tort reform would eliminate the expensive practice of defensive medicine, Obama is opposed to it.

Most recently Obama has proposed federal regulation of insurance premium hikes, in the wake of Anthem’s truly stupid idea to raise premiums in California almost 40%, which would only add another layer of control on top of the regulation of insurance companies by 50 states.

The impasse that congress and the White House now find themselves facing is not about a difference of ideas. It’s about a difference in the way of governing. And as ObamaCare circles the drain hole, the president seems willing to bet his party in one last round of “chicken” and ignore the warning of polls by using a procedure designed to pass budgetary bills, not policy bills.

In his closing remarks, Obama bordered on ominous.

"If we can't (produce a bipartisan bill), then we've got to make some honest decisions,'' the president said. With an implied threat to proceed with passage of a healthcare bill over the objections of Republicans, “there are going to be lots of arguments over procedures,” Obama said, because “we have honest disagreements about the vision for the country, and that's what elections are for.''

He's right. This is an issue that will be settled in November.