Freedom Line Blog

This time, the Senate has scheduled a midnight vote on health care, when the nation will once again be engaging in less destructive activities, like watching college football.

According to Senate sources, the actual vote on cloture will take place around 8:00 this Saturday night.  If the cloture motion garners 60 votes, then it will only take 51 Senators to pass the final version, and all indications are that Democrats have at least 55 votes to pass the health care bill.

The Senate will actually begin its Saturday session in the morning, so citizens have all day to lobby against the largest government takeover of health care in history.

You can call Congress at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote “No” on the Senate’s health care bill.  Don’t let moderates off of the hook.   A vote for cloture is a vote for final passage of the bill.

Indications are that at least two Democrats are hesitant to support the legislation but it is up to taxpayers across the country to keep the pressure on moderate Senators.

With the Congressional Budget Office set to release its cost estimate of the Senate’s version of health care “reform” sometime this week, taxpayers continue to speculate over the whip count and the prospects for ObamaCare.

Congress.org has set up a virtual prediction market for the health care bill in the Senate.  Click here to make your predictions of ObamaCare’s future.  (Sorry, you can’t make any money off of your predictions.)

Let’s all hope that President Obama and leaders in Congress have a sudden change of heart and decide that more massive government won’t bring down health costs or reduce the federal deficit.

My prediction was 55-45 for final passage, but that doesn’t mean the bill will survive a filibuster attempt.

HT: Political Wire

Uninhibited by the mounting debt being incurred through present and future spending, the White House is pressuring Congress to raise the legal cap on the country’s debt limit.  Rebecca Christie of Bloomberg reports:

The Obama administration is confident Congress will raise the country’s debt limit by year end to avert a showdown similar to the one that shuttered parts of the government in 1995, administration officials said.

The White House wants an increase of at least $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, according to a person familiar with the deliberations between lawmakers and the administration. Record budget deficits are pushing the national debt closer to the $12.1 trillion statutory limit.”

One would think a debt ceiling of $12.1 trillion would be a high enough threshold that – if reached – would prompt lawmakers to question the necessity (and sanity) of going over it.  One would be wrong.  What’s more, the Obama Administration is signaling that it doesn’t really care how Congress gets around to extending the nation’s credit line, as long as it does so before anyone has to choose between less spending or less work for federal employees.

The administration officials said the White House is open to any legislative vehicle that will raise the debt limit, by any amount.”

This one is from James Capretta over at The New Atlantis, a technology and science journal, is a must read.

Capretta highlights why the federal government will never be able to truly “bend the cost curve” on health care.

Here is the link and a few highlights:

Obamacare is predicated on the assumption that the federal government has the knowledge, capacity, and will to drive greater efficiency in American health care. Inadvertently, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has become an articulate spokesman for why that assumption is dead wrong.

Emanuel blames the limits of politics. “Let’s be honest,” Emanuel apparently stated in a recent interview. “The goal isn’t to see whether I can pass this through the executive board of the Brookings Institution. I’m passing it through the United State Congress with people who represent constituents.” That’s exactly right of course. But it’s also an indictment of the entire Obamacare enterprise. The health-care bills under consideration would hand over to the federal government nearly all power for organizing American health care. And yet there is not a shred of evidence that Congress or the administration can handle these tasks well.

The only way to slow the pace of rising costs without sacrificing quality is by building a functioning marketplace, with cost-conscious consumers driving the allocation of resources. The government must play an important oversight role in such a marketplace. But if we rely on politicians, or even commissions that answer to them, for cost control, what we will get is lower quality, not more efficiency.

HT: Greg Mankiw

Someone in Congress really wants to keep their job.  Representative John Adler, a Democrat who represents New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional District, just announced that he will be voting against H.R. 3962, the government takeover of health care.

This comes as a bit of a surprise since rarely are New Jersey Democrats of the moderate “Blue Dog” variety.  Then again, President Obama won Adler’s district last year, but only with 52 percent of the vote.

Call Representative Adler at 202-225-4765 to thank him for standing up for taxpayers and freedom.  Or if you live in his district, you can reach his local offices at 856-985-2777 or 732-608-7235.

There are a lot of awful provisions in Speaker Pelosi’s 1,990 page stab at health care “reform.”  For millions of small businesses across the country, a 5.4 percent surtax is high on the list of undesirable provisions.

The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) released an estimate that determined one-third of small businesses will be hit with the new 5.4 percent surtax.  Roughly speaking, small businesses can look forward to forking over another $150 billion next year in new taxes to feed Washington’s spending binge.

The lesson: Small businesses must trust Congress.  Only Congress knows that the best way to bring down a 10.2 percent unemployment rate is to tax small businesses, raise utility rates through Cap-and-Trade legislation, take over $2 trillion from the private sector through taxes and determine corporate pay scales… Congress knows best.

Here is the JCT cost estimate.  To read more on health care, click here.

This afternoon, thousands of protesters and activists marched on Capitol Hill yelling “Kill the Bill,” urging Representatives to vote against Speaker Pelosi’s massive $1 trillion government takeover of health care.  There are some reports that entrances to the Capitol are clogged with taxpayers waiting to get their chance to lobby Congress directly.

The rally was prompted by Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), who labeled this week the “Super Bowl of Freedom” and called on the American people to join her in making a “House Call” to Members of Congress in opposition to ObamaCare.  With House Democrats set to vote on Pelosi’s 1,990 bill on Saturday, the turnout today for Bachmann’s “House Call” was phenomenal.

Hat tip to FreedomWorks, the staff of which took some great pictures of the event seen below.  

Part of the so-called “cost savings” in the House version of health care reform are premised on large cuts to Medicare, a typical sore spot for senior citizens.

One area that is scheduled to be on the chopping block is reimbursement payments to physicians participating in the Medicare program.  Current reimbursement rates are insultingly low, and as a result, some doctors refuse to even participate in Medicare.

The House health care bill calls for an additional 21 percent reduction in payments to physicians, to begin in 2010. Judging from this CBO statement, even the green eyeshade folks don’t believe Congress will allow doctors to take another hit to reimbursement rates:

The bill would put into effect (or leave in effect) a number of procedures that might be difficult to maintain over a long period of time. It would leave in place the 21 percent reduction in the payment rates for physicians currently scheduled for 2010. At the same time, the bill includes a number of provisions that would constrain payment rates for other providers of Medicare services.”

Any failure to contain Medicare costs, despite the surge of new beneficiaries over the next decade, will surely turn health care reform into another budget-breaker.

For those worrying about the lack of legislative action in our nation’s capitol, Jonathan Weisman at the Wall Street Journal writes a nice summary of the “other” legislation racing through Congress and landing on President Obama’s desk.

Last week, Mr. Obama signed defense-policy legislation that included an unrelated measure widening federal hate-crimes laws to cover sexual orientation and gender identification — 12 years after it was first introduced. The same legislation also tightened the rules of admissible evidence for military commissions, an issue that consumed Congress in debate in 2007 but received almost no attention this go-round.

Other new measures signed into law since the administration took office, all of which kicked up controversy in past congresses, make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, set aside land in the West from development, give the government the power to regulate tobacco and raise tobacco taxes to expand health insurance for children. Congress and the White House, in the new defense-policy bill, also killed weapons programs that have survived earlier attempts at termination, among them, the F-22 fighter jet, the VH-71 presidential helicopter and the Army’s Future Combat System.

Rob Nabors, the White House’s deputy budget director, called the series of new laws “a very, very quiet but important victory.”

But it’s not like the Republican opposition is asleep at the wheel. According to Rep. Tom Price (R. Ga.), “The administration is pushing so many things so rapidly it’s difficult to concentrate on all of them.” Hopefully, the bills they are concentrating on – health care, energy, education – can be stopped or modified before they too become unqualified Democratic victories.

Despite recent bureaucratic attempts to regulate and control the Internet, there are at least some in Congress who realize that an open Internet cannot coexist with government regulation.

This week, Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced H.R. 3942, a bill to block the FCC’s net neutrality regulations.  As Blackburn lamented, “The Internet is the last truly open public marketplace.  Its openness is the key to its efficiency and success.  Not all public spaces need to be regulated spaces.”

At present, H.R. 3942 has no cosponsors, but that only means you should call your representative and urge them to sign on to support Internet freedom.

Read the text of the bill here.  Read more of CFIF on net neutrality here.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino comments on how the culture of corruption in Washington has gotten worse, not better, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership.  Watch the video below.

A new poll released by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Americans are becoming less enthusiastic about capping greenhouse gas emissions.  According to the survey, only 35% say global warming is a very serious problem.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) commented, “Perhaps the most interesting finding in this poll, aside from the precipitous drop in the number of Independents who believe global warming is a problem, is that the more Americans learn about cap-and-trade, the more they oppose cap-and-trade.”

Surprisingly, 55% of respondents said that they have heard “nothing at all” about cap-and-trade (legislation that would impose new energy taxes) proposals being debated in Congress.

For more info see here and here.

Call Congress at 202-224-3121 and urge your representatives to oppose new energy taxes.

The House of Representatives protected one of its own today by voting only to refer Rep. Charles Rangel to the House Ethics Committee; he will remain the Chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Rangel, as the NY Times has revealed, has taken many liberties in his position of power.  The Times discovered that Rangel has four rent-controlled apartments, and actually uses one as his campaign office, likely in violation of House rules.  In addition, Rangel recently revealed that he failed to disclose assets from his swanky beach home in the Dominican Republic, leading to over $10,000 in back taxes.

Being an elected official has been prosperous for the New York Congressman, as Rangel lists his net worth in the millions.  Apparently there are perks to writing the nation’s tax laws, and subsequently failing to follow them.  His published ethical improprieties are just the tip of the iceberg, which is why newspapers across the country are calling for Rangel to step down. See here and here.

Today, Representative John Carter from Texas introduced a resolution that would have referred Rangel’s case to the House Ethics Committee and stripped Rangel of his Chairmanship.  The vote failed 153-246, with six Republicans voting with Rangel (King (NY), Rohrabacher (CA), Paul (TX), Murphy (PA), Jones (NC) and Young (AK).

So, as of today the New York Times and the Washington Post are investigating Rangel but Congress is not.  It looks like it will take an indictment or two to get things rolling in America’s most expensive sausage factory.

In these tough economic times, most American families have been forced to tighten belts and pinch pennies to make ends meet.  And with rising deficits and an exploding national debt, we would expect our lawmakers in Washington to do the same when it comes to spending our tax dollars.  That is, if Americans didn’t know any better. 

Nu Raju of Politico.com reports:

Under a House-Senate conference measure, approved by the House last week and poised for passage in the Senate on Wednesday, spending for the legislative branch will increase 5.8 percent this year, boosting Capitol Hill’s annual budget to $4.7 billion.

“The measure includes a hodgepodge of new funding for lawmakers: a $500,000 pilot program for senators to send out postcards about their town hall meetings, $30,000 for receptions for foreign dignitaries and $4 million for consultants…”

The measure also includes a 128% increase in funding for House office buildings and a 155% spending increase for the Government Printing Office’s revolving fund, among other goodies.

According to a new Rasmussen Reports survey, Members of Congress have surpassed those evil, greedy, no-good Corporate CEOs as having the least respected job in America.

Just one-out-of-four Americans (25%) have a favor[able] opinion of members of Congress. Seventy-two percent (72%) view them unfavorably. There’s some intensity in that perception, too. Only four percent (4%) have a very favorable view of congressmen, while 37% view them very unfavorably.

Even 56% of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Congress although their party controls both the House and the Senate. Of course, their opposition pales next to the 86% of Republicans and 81% of adults not affiliated with either party who have an unfavorable opinion of Congress.

Topping the list for most respected profession are small business owners, with 94% of respondents claiming to have a favorable opinion of them vs. a mere 3% who expressed an unfavorable opinion.  Journalists finished fifth out of the nine professions asked about with 43% viewing them favorably vs. 54% unfavorably.

I wonder how President Obama would rank the professions asked about in the Rasmussen Reports survey?   He must least respect those “greedy Corporate CEOs”  for making profits and creating jobs, right?  Or, does Obama least respect those small business owners who stand to lose most from the policies highest on his agenda?  

Then again, maybe Obama agrees with the public and their unfavorable view of Members of Congress, who failed to ram through his cap-and-trade and government-run health care schemes by the beginning of August as he demanded?   No… he must least respect those biased journalists.  How dare that Stephanopoulos press him on the fact that his health care tax is a tax when he says it isn’t a tax, because if it were a tax he again would be breaking his promise not to raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 per year?

The vote, as one would expect, was mostly a party-line vote (240-179).  Seven Republicans voted for the resolution while twelve Democrats voted against “censuring” Wilson.  Five members voted present (Engel, Foster, Frank, Shea-Porter and Skelton).

Here is the full roll call.

Congress’ popularity has been in the dump for some time now.  That’s why it’s not surprising that a large majority of voters believe that the entire Congress should be thrown out of office and that we should start anew.

According to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, “57% [of U.S. voters] would vote to replace the entire Congress and start all over again.”  A mere one in four voters, or 25%, would vote to keep the current Congress.  18% are unsure what they would do.

Other highlights of the survey include:

• 70% of voters unaffiliated with either major political party would vote to replace ALL members of the House and Senate.
• A mere 14% of voters give the current Congress a “good” or “excellent” rating for performance.
• 74% of voters trust their own economic judgement over that of Congress.
• 75% of voters say Members of Congress are more interested in their own careers than helping the people they are supposed to represent.

Read the full summary here.