Health Care Summit has Repubs getting Knickers all Bunched Up

Jonathan Cohn is reporting that the letter of invitation being sent out to Congressional leaders and other guests states that prior to the Feb. 25 Summit the Democrats will post online the text of a proposed health care reform bill:

  Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package. This legislation would put a stop to insurance company abuses, extend coverage to millions of Americans, get control of skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reduce the deficit.

Speculation is that the proposed legislation being posted is the compromise version of the Senate bill which has been more or less on life support up to now.

The letter goes on to request that Republicans be prepared with their own comprehensive version of a plan which would achieve the same goals, post it online as well, and be ready to discuss it. *snort*  (Sorry, couldn’t help that.)

However the Republican response to this has been fairly bizarre.  Instead of saying that they certainly will come up with their own proposal because, hey, they’re NOT the Party of No as everyone has been saying,  you know, they’re the Party of IDEAS!, they have taken something of a different tactic.  As reported by the N.Y. Times:

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, the House Republican leaders asserted that the efforts by Democrats to reach a compromise plan would undermine negotiations at a bipartisan summit scheduled by President Obama for Feb. 25.

Mr. Obama has said all along that he wants to be able to present a unified Democratic health care proposal at the summit and then debate the major provisions with Republicans and independent experts to see if they have better ideas.

But in their letter, House Republicans suggested that the ongoing work by Democrats to resolve their differences would amount to a “backroom deal among the White House and Democratic leaders” that would “make a mockery of the president’s stated desire to have a ‘bipartisan’ and ‘transparent’ dialogue.”

Even weirder, they then go on to claim that “trickery” is in the works:

We were further taken aback by a report in CongressDaily later the same day in which an aide to the Speaker, appearing at the National Health Policy Conference, described the legislative “trick” Democratic Leadership intends to use to jam through a “pre-negotiated” health care bill.
[snip]
To ensure we can move forward in good faith, we ask that you publicly disavow these reports and assure the American people that Democratic Leadership is not putting together any kind of backroom deal or plotting any kind of legislative trickery to pass it.

“Trickery”.  Hmmmm.  What could they mean by that?  Ohhhh, you mean reconciliation!

Trickery, indeed.  The process by which tricky George W. Bush was able to pass The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconcilation Act of 2001 aka the biggest tax giveaway to wealthy and upper middle class Americans since Ronnie Reagan was in charge.  He also managed to push through an act two years later accelerating the rate at which the tax cuts would phase in.  Again through trickery reconciliation.

So if the Republicans want to call this stuff “trickery” they should know.  They practically invented it.

And Ezra Klein sees some silver lining in all this:

The fact that Republicans are making bizarre requests to change the rules of the summit rather than just ignoring the gambit altogether suggests they’ve not figured out how to deal with the event. This is the first time since the Massachusetts election, in fact, that’s it’s been them, rather than the Democrats, who’ve seemed confused. The White House deserves some credit for that, and we’ll see if they can keep congressional Democrats in line long enough to press the advantage.

Posted by marindenver on 02/15/10 at 06:17 PM • Permalink

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