David Karki

When I saw that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had canceled the Columbus Day recess so as to try and ram the monstrosity that is Obama’s health care bill through, I was forced to stop and wonder why. After all, the bill will not go into effect until 2013 anyway – can’t have it causing bad things that would put President Obama’s re-election in 2012 in jeopardy, you know. So why the heated rush?

Stuntman.

My first thought was simple politics. The more people find out about this thoroughly unconstitutional bill, the less they like it and rightly so. But that ship has really already sailed; Sarah Palin’s now famous “death panel” Facebook posting saw to that.

Moreover, the bill is not wanted, there isn’t a poll around that doesn’t indicate this, the Democrats’ own right flank in both chambers is acutely aware of this as their re-elections in 2010 would be the most imperiled by any backlash it caused.

Because of all that, the convoluted method by which Reid would get the bill around opposition and through the Senate is beyond disgusting. It’s been said that the creation of legislation is as aesthetically pleasing as that of sausage, but that comparison is completely unfair to meat grinders and pureéd pig flesh.

Reid would take a completely unrelated bill passed by the House upon which the Senate will not otherwise act, and add an amendment to it that deletes the language in its entirety and adds Obamacare instead. As this is technically still a House bill (though in reality clearly is not), he can then use his power as Majority Leader to introduce it directly on the Senate floor, which will get it past the committees where it is currently stuck.

There would then be a vote to move (or act on) that bill, which is subject to filibuster and needs 60 senators to pass. If Reid didn’t have the votes, he’d add Obamacare to the budget reconciliation which cannot be filibustered and ram it through with 51 votes (or 50 + VP Biden).

So, to put it as simply as possible: Reid would use a throwaway House bill as a vessel for an end-run around Senate committee opposition, then use the budget as a vessel for an end-run around a filibuster.

Finally, Speaker Pelosi would ensure that the Senate bill got quick-marched through the House verbatim on a series of party-line votes – to avoid any need for a conference committee – and sent to Obama for his immediate signature.

To hell with campaign promises about posting bills online for 72 hours before the vote; a bill that doesn’t go into effect for 4 years has to be rammed through next week via every sleazy parliamentary maneuver available so as to evade opposition.

And yet Reid and Pelosi are still pulling this stunt. (Don’t think that Obama, even though he’s keeping his distance from it all, isn’t totally in on it too.) Why? What on earth could be so damn important about Obamacare that it has to be put through this soon and this way?

The logical answer is that something much larger must be at stake. The higher the risk one is willing to take, the greater the potential payoff has to be in order to justify it – usually several orders of magnitude higher than the risk taken. Anyone who’s ever seriously played poker understands this principle.

So what would the Democrats get that would justify such a high-stakes plan? What would the payoff be in this case?

I think the answer is nothing less than total power over and control of everyone and everything. With health care, as with the cap and trade bill, the result would be that every last tiny detail of all of our lives would be dictated by Washington. Politicians, with their seemingly limitless egomania, think they know better than all us peons how our lives ought to be lived and how society ought to be ordered. So much so that they believe the end of forcibly creating such order justifies any means necessary to bring it about.

And once done, with the potential 2010 electoral backlash unleashed, it’s hard to see why they would stop there. “In for a penny, in for a pound” would seem to be the applicable saying. So health care, then cap and trade (health care’s enviro-wacko twin sibling), then amnesty (gotta rubber-stamp 20 million new voters by November 2010 to offset all those lost), and on down the line.

You may think I”m overreacting or a conspiracy theorist, but I would argue that the best evidence in my favor is the Democrats’ own behavior. How else to explain the otherwise inexplicable lengths to which they are going to pass a bill that is unpopular and unwanted, and to do so in such haste when it won’t take effect for four years?

The only sensible explanation for it all is that health care is the first boulder off the cliff, and once it starts rolling an avalanche will be touched off. Heaven help all of us who lie directly in its path.

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