RUSH: Heritage, Morning Bell. I’m going to get started on this, then I’m gonna take a break and we’ll come back to it. It’s a little complicated only because of what’s so convoluted and unconstitutional about what the House of Representatives is trying to do here. But there is no bill but the Senate bill. The reconciliation bill, all these changes that they want to attach to a ‘deemed’-to-have-passed Senate bill that has not been written. They say they’re waiting on the score of whatever the yet-to-be written bill is from the Congressional Budget Office. Well, a little hint for you. Pelosi got that number yesterday. She’s holding it back. I don’t know what it is. I do know what it is. I’ll guarantee you the number is under a trillion dollars. That’s the tipping point number.
So she’s been working with the CBO and she’s told ’em whatever’s hit there, but there’s nothing to score. Again, there’s not even a draft outline of this. It’s why they don’t have any votes! The only bill they have right now is the Senate bill. They haven’t put together this reconciliation thing, yet she got a score from the CBO yesterday, I’m told, and she’s going to announce it tomorrow to try to ignite some momentum heading into the weekend. Her objective, if she can do it, is to pass this bill on Saturday when there aren’t as many people running around. This is her objective. Now, we’re told all over the place that they’re 11 votes shy, 12 votes shy, 16 votes shy, 5 votes shy.
There are four different estimates coming from the four different leaders of Pelosi’s leadership team. But what is known is that right now there is no bill except the Senate bill, and there was another poll that came out yesterday (the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released theirs) and it showed the percentage of Americans who believe Obama’s health care plan is a bad idea is at the highest level since they started asking the question last year, 48%. Only 36% of Americans are willing to call Obama’s plan or the Senate plan or whoever’s plan a good idea, and that’s up a whole four points from the time Louise Slaughter started writing things about it. So there’s no improvement. It’s worsening. There is no reconciliation bill yet.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, there are a lot of people who are starting to say (John Hood is one from the CarolinaJournal.com) if they pass this using the Slaughter Solution — in other words, literally shredding the Constitution. If they do this in a lawless way, then he’s not going to comply. He’s simply not going to comply and he’s urging everybody else not to comply. We don’t have to comply with illegally passed bills. We don’t have to comply with things which are unconstitutional. For example, maybe we can just ‘deem’ our tax returns to have been filed. But we don’t actually file ’em. We just ‘deem’ our taxes to have been paid.
We just ‘deem’ it! I mean, if they can ‘deem’ to have passed laws, we can certainly say that we are ‘deemed’ to have complied with them. The word ‘deemed’ means what? It means pretend! That’s what it means. We’re going to pretend that we passed the Senate bill. That’s what it means. We’re going to pretend that we paid our taxes. Lawlessness? Unconstitutionality? Why do we have to comply with it? Now, let’s get back to this mess that’s taking place in the House of Representatives. The Senate health bill is so unpopular in the House that the leftist House leadership is desperately trying to trick the American people into believing that the House can pass the Senate bill without voting on it. There are many reasons why they want to do this but at the top of the list — and I kid you not — is that members of the House want to be able to go home during their campaign for reelection and say, ‘No, I did not vote for the Senate bill.
‘You won’t find a vote for the Senate bill. I didn’t vote for it. No, no, we ‘deemed’ it to have passed but we didn’t vote for it.’ They do not want to be tied to a vote on it. I know this sounds convoluted, and it is. It’s unconstitutional and it is illegal. So that’s why they’ve come up with the Slaughter Rule which would ‘deem’ the Senate bill passed, at the same time the House would approve a new reconciliation bill. Pelosi was crystal clear on her motives this week. She told a group of leftist bloggers, ‘It’s more insider- and process-oriented than most people want to know about, but I like it, ’cause people don’t have the vote on the Senate bill.’ There is one increasingly glaring problem, however, with Pelosi’s pass-the-bill-without-voting plan. It’s impossible, proving impossible to draft that reconciliation bill. Now, again, not to insult your intelligence — you probably know — but I just want to explain what the reconciliation bill is.
Think of it as a bunch of amendments. Think of it as the House fixes what they don’t like about the Senate bill. And they end up with two separate bills. They don’t end up with a reconciliation bill that is attached to the Senate bill as one bill. They end up with two separate bills. The Senate bill which they ‘deem’ to have passed, and then their reconciliation package. And those two bills would not go back to the Senate. They would go straight to Obama. If the House votes on these this thing, that’s the Slaughter Rule. They even found… The Drive-Bys are desperately looking for constitutional lawyers to say this is no problem. And they found some doofus in Maryland, someone at the University of Maryland who actually said, ‘Somebody show me in the Constitution where it says you can’t pass two bills with one vote?’ This is a guy teaching constitutional law to people. ‘Show me in the Constitution,’ he said, ‘where you can’t pass two bills with one vote.’
Now, the problem is that it’s proving difficult to draft that reconciliation bill. The Democrats first promised to unveil their new bill last Wednesday. Then it was Thursday and then Friday. Then they were going to release it Monday. Then we were told they were going to release it last night. As of this morning, still nothing. The Democrats say they’re waiting for a score from the Congressional Budget Office before they release their bill. But there’s nothing stopping them from releasing whatever text they have now and then publicizing the CBO score when it comes back. But they don’t want to do the open and transparent path. They don’t want to take that way. I’m told from a very, very reliable source (a spy) that Pelosi’s got her CBO score and she’s waiting to release it tomorrow to provide some momentum. If she’s got it and is going to wait to release it, then it obviously is a score that she likes, which is something under $1 trillion.
Now, the Heritage Foundation insists that ‘getting a CBO score consistent with reconciliation is going to be very difficult,’ and they tell me their reasons here. But if the House Democrats have chosen to break the law, if they have chosen to ignore the law, if they have chosen to simply violate the Constitution, then why would they stop or be stopped by any other rules? Now, here’s what Heritage says will be the difficulty in ‘getting a CBO score consistent with reconciliation is going to be very difficult. According to House rules…’ But what do they matter anymore now? ‘According to House rules, a reconciliation measure must reduce the deficit by at least $2 billion over five years compared to existing law. In ‘this case, however, ‘existing law’ would be the yet-to-be-passed Senate bill.’ It exists only in the Senate. So that’s the existing law.
‘And all of the changes Democrats want to make to the Senate bill’ the amendments, the reconciliation, such as ‘scaling back the tax on high-end health insurance policies; closing the Medicare D loophole; boosting insurance subsidies; increasing Medicaid payments; and expanding the Cornhusker Kickback’ to every state. That’s how they’re dealing with it in the House. They’re not taking it away from Ben Nelson. They’re going to give it to every state, and they can’t do any of this and satisfy the rule that says the bill must reduce the deficit by at least $2 billion over five years compared to existing law, which is the Senate bill. There’s no way what they’re writing is going to reduce the deficit at all. Even the AP today does a Fact-Check on Obama and virtually everything he’s saying about this bill is a lie.
They even point out that he says premiums are going to go down. They’re not. Premiums are going up. Even the AP! It’s getting to the point now… You know, I would like one of you Obama supporters in the audience to call me today and tell me one thing Obama has said about health care that’s true. It would take a lot less time for you to tell me what he said that’s true, than for me to sit here and listen to all the lies because he’s lying about everything. None of what he’s saying is factual, none of it is truthful. So expanding the Cornhusker Kickback, scaling back the tax on high-end health insurance policies, closing the Medicare D loophole — Oh, do you know they’re also double counting? $500 billion in Medicare cuts are then going to be taken and applied to the new reconciliation bill. They’re counting it twice.
They’re saying, ‘Well, we’re cutting the budget by $500 billion.’ You’re not because you’re just changing pockets. You’re taking the 500 billion out of the Senate bill and you’re moving it into your reconciliation bill. It’s the same $500 billion. There’s no cut, but they’re counting it as a cut. Anything the CBO comes up with here is not going to be factual or true, either. Now, all of this means that the Democrats are going to have to identify some new revenues to make the CBO score work. ‘And as Congressional Quarterly reported yesterday, Democrats have not yet identified the right pay-fors to game the CBO right. That is why House Leadership has not unveiled their new bill yet: they can’t figure out how to pay for it.’ Now, again it’s not that they care about having to pay for it. It’s that they gotta have a way on paper that makes it look like it’s being paid for.
But my reaction to what Heritage says here (this is in their Morning Bell blog) is: If they’re willing to go the total unconstitutional route, if they are willing to uproot the very fabric of our country to pass this… And you gotta ask yourself something about that, by the way: Just what is in this that makes it so important for them to do what they are doing? Why are they willing to lose the majority in November, in the House, maybe the Senate as well? Why are they willing to risk losing the White House in 2012? Why are they willing to openly violate the Constitution? Why? What’s in this? What’s in this that we don’t know? What makes this so important? I think, if I had to take a stab at this: When you boil it all down, what this does is destroy the private insurance business, just wipes it out, just eliminates it — and it gets them single-payer within years without ever having to really vote on that concept.
There are so many deceptions and tricks going on in this. Now, Heritage says — after all of this, after saying the House hasn’t produced their new bill because ‘they can’t figure out how to pay for it. Not that it really matters if they ever do. The reconciliation bill is never going to become law. The Senate will never pass it. They have no reason to. The Senate likes the existing Senate bill. That’s why it’s called ‘the Senate bill’ … they are the ones who passed it. The White House also likes the Senate bill. As soon as the House passes it, President Obama will sign it and then leave for Asia. That’s it. Obamacare will be… ‘the law of the land.” But my fear, going a bit beyond Heritage, is that they will do the Slaughter Solution with the claim that they have ‘deemed’ the Senate bill to have passed.
And then they will send the Senate bill to the president to sign without sending reconciliation to the Senate. The plan is to treat them as separate bills. The Senate bill is passed, the reconciliation bill is a second bill. So the Senate would not have to vote again, the Senate could ignore the reconciliation bill altogether, and if they wanted to, they could go ahead and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to attach this to the Senate bill, make it one bill, and have the president sign all this.’ Once you throw down the rules, once you say that we’re going to ‘deem’ it to have passed, there’s no limit to what you can do. None whatsoever. Once you pretend that you’ve done something, you don’t have to stop pretending at all. So it is convoluted, but at the bottom of all this is: They still don’t have the votes, and they don’t have the votes because the members of the House despise the Senate bill.
They don’t have a reconciliation bill yet because there are however many Democrats in there that want their fingers in this pie that have to be satisfied, and it’s just a mess. That’s why Clyburn saying, ‘Oh, we might not even get to this by Easter,’ and Hoyer is saying, ‘Ah, we don’t have the votes now.’ They don’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill, and they never will have the votes to pass the Senate bill. It is despised in the House. This reconciliation, Slaughter Rule — and this is where Pelosi is willing to trick her own members. Go ahead and put together this amendment thing, this reconciliation bill and tell the members, ‘Yeah, we’re fixing this. We’re fixing this. All this is going to be fixed.
‘We’re just going to ‘deem’ the Senate bill to be signed. We’re going to fix it. We’re going to send this stuff back over to the Senate. We’re going to fix it all.’ But what won’t happen is sending it back to the Senate. The Senate will never see it. It’ll just die. The President will sign the Senate bill, ‘deem to have passed.’ Nobody in the House will have actually voted on it, and House members get screwed. The only upside for them is they get to run home and say, ‘I didn’t vote for the Senate bill. We ‘deemed’ it to have passed.’ This is beyond rational explanation and description. This makes Watergate look like Romper Room. This is the overthrow of the US constitutional system, orchestrated from the White House through the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. That’s what’s going on here.