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Coburn Admits Republicans Are Just Trying To Kill The Bill: ‘The American People Want To Hear Us Say No’

By Zaid Jilani on Dec 18, 2009 at 8:45 pm

As the health care debate enters its final stages, Republicans are doing everything they can to slow the process down in order to “defeat” the Senate bill. In recent days, GOP senators have claimed they are working “in good faith” and simply want to take the time to “see a little bit of what’s in the bill.”

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who most recently killed an attempt by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to have a debate about his single-payer health care amendment by forcing the 767-page document to be read aloud on the floor, today let truth slip out. On Washington Journal, Coburn explained that he sees the GOP’s role is to defeat the health care bill, saying “The American people want to hear us say no.” He added, “No is a wonderful word“:

COBURN: Look, there’s nothing wrong with the word no. No is a word Washington needs to hear. The American people want to hear us say no. No when we’re stealing 43 cents out of every dollar that we spend this year from our grandkids. No when we’re ignoring the Constitution. No when we’re gonna pass a bill that says you have to buy something even when it goes totally against the Constitution and the enumerated powers of our Constitution. No to socialism at every turn. … There’s nothing wrong with that word, it’s a healthy word. … No is a wonderful word.

Watch it:

Later this afternoon, Coburn admitted to reporters during a conference call hosted by the Republican National Committee that the goal of his party is to “kill the bill.”

Climate Progress

Washington Times: “Obama wins modest victory in Copenhagen”

By Joe Romm on Dec 18, 2009 at 7:03 pm

Sierra Club: “A historic–if incomplete–agreement to begin tackling global warming.”

President Obama Friday announced that he had agreed to a “first step” global warming deal with China, India, Brazil and South Africa at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen–an accord long on promise and short on accomplishment….

Mr. Obama called the agreement “meaningful and unprecedented,” because it included promises by China and other major developing nations to slow the growth of their greenhouse gas emissions. “What we’ve achieved in Copenhagen will not be the end, but the beginning, the beginning of a new era of international action,” he said.

That’s the first take of the conservative daily Washington Times in their useful daily Washington Insight/Energy (sub. req’d).

In his DotEarth post, “A ‘First Step’ Climate Deal,” Revkin writes, “Here is a link to the ‘Copenhagen Accord‘ as it stands in the middle of the night here.”  The Washington Post has a long story just up, “World leaders reach deal on climate change in Copenhagen.”

Here’s the other side of the spectrum from WashTimes — Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director:

Read more

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 18, 2009 at 6:14 pm

Cowboys and Indians:

— Nancy Pelosi writing checks she can’t cash about Senate action on climate change.

— CBPP says Medicare buy-in wasn’t all that anyway.

— Every few days Atrios says voters need to like health care reform, but I never understand what concrete steps he thinks which people should take.

— We had very tiny burgers at the CAP holiday party, too.

— Did congress create a trust fund for the Mubaraks?

Song of the day: Sleigh Bells “Infinity Guitars”.

Politics

After ‘Truth Squad’ Fizzles, Der Spiegel Reporter Tells Inhofe: ‘You’re Ridiculous’

By Ben Armbruster on Dec 18, 2009 at 6:00 pm

inhofejamesBack in September, godfather of global warming deniers Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) announced that he would be going to the U.N.’s climate change summit in Copenhagen this week to present “another view.” “I think somebody has to be there — a one-man truth squad,” he said. His “truth squad” later expanded to three, with Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Roger Wicker (R-MS) joining in.

But MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted last night that Inhofe’s mission of wreaking havoc on the summit fell flat:

MADDOW: When Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton and all the bigwigs arrived in Denmark, the Inhofe truth squad was nowhere to be found.

We confirmed with the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works that truth squad, denialist, congressional delegation with Senators Barrasso and Wicker – that has ended up getting canceled.

Inhofe did travel to Copenhagen however — with a single staffer and when he got there, all he could muster was an “impromptu” press conference and spent a grand total of two hours in the Danish capital. But even during the press conference, few reporters showed up and the Oklahoma senator wasn’t very well received by the ones who did:

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

Politco notes that when Inhofe arrived at the summit “the halls were half-deserted” and that he “walked quickly, brushing off an aide who suggested that he slow down and take a breath.” “I don’t want to breathe — I want to get something done,” he said.

Yglesias

Nelson’s Bizarre Medicaid Objection

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 18, 2009 at 5:28 pm

ben-nelson-nominate-500-1

In addition to his abortion objections, Ben Nelson has developed a late-breaking concern that health reform’s Medicaid expansion provisions could force huge new costs onto the budget of Nebraska. But Alec MacGillis points out that the authors of the legislation already thought of this:

To keep this expansion from burdening already-strapped state governments, the bills call for the federal government to pick up nearly the entire cost of covering newly eligible people — 91 percent of the cost in the House bill, and even more of it in the Senate bill.

The Senate bill would have the federal government cover all newly eligible people until 2016, at which point its share would begin to decline, to 92.8 percent by 2019 in the case of Nebraska. These terms would cover the first 10 years of the bill, then be revisited.

When you consider what a large role Senators Max Baucus of Montana and Kent Conrad of North Dakota had in crafting this legislation, there’s very little ex ante plausibility to the idea that the Senate bill would screw-over large sparsely populated plains states. Nebraska would have to be really crazy to not participate in this structure.

Let me also note that this whole process has been going on for months and Medicaid expansion has been at the core from the beginning. Nelson has had plenty of opportunity to try to come up with ideas on this score, and didn’t. The bill is also phased in very slowly, so if he wants to tweak the details of financing Medicaid expansion he could easily do so in 2010 or 2011 or 2012 or 2013 or 2014 or 2015 or 2016 before Nebraska has to pay a single cent on this. Derailing the process at this point over the idea that paying 7.2 percent of the cost (!) of Medicaid expansion in 2019 (!) will bankrupt the state reeks of someone who’s searching for reason to say “no.”

Alyssa

Best Posse Ever

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 18, 2009 at 5:07 pm

So, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was on FX last night, and I definitely didn’t notice this when I saw it in 2005, but Angelina Jolie’s team of spies in the movie is made up of some pretty amazing female actors.  Among them, Kerry Washington, former Law & Order: Special Victims Unit ADA Alex Cabot (aka Stephanie March), and House M.D. vet (and Kirk’s mom!) Jennifer Morrison.  I’ve always had genial feelings for that particular piece of trash, and I feel even better about it noticing they gave some actresses a little work in roles that could have been filled by nobodies.

Politics

After Falsely Accusing Obama Of Politicizing The Military, GOP Filibusters Defense Bill To Kill Health Reform

By Lee Fang on Dec 18, 2009 at 4:45 pm

Over the past few days, Republican senators have seized on a false story manufactured by a former Republican operative at The Weekly Standard. The unfounded rumor alleged that sources in the White House had told Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) to vote for health reform, or else the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska would be closed. Using the story, Republican senators quickly accused the President of politicizing the military:

SEN. KIT BOND (R-MO): “The rumors out there, we haven’t confirmed it, but the rumor keeps coming back that he’s threatened to close a major air base in Nebraska. It is total blackmail. It’s the worst kind of Chicago politics.” [WND, 12/17/09]

SEN. BOB BENNETT (R-UT): “This would be one of the most outrageous demonstrations of presidential power I’ve ever seen.” [The Hill, 12/17/09]

LETTER FROM 20 GOP SENATORS: “We do not want to see the name of a base from our state on a BRAC list and think it has been put there to settle partisan scores.” [The Hill, 12/17/09]

Talking to reporters, Nelson blasted the phony story as “yellow journalism at its worst” that came from “inside-the-Beltway partisans who only want to derail health care reform.” But last night, in the middle of their own campaign to portray Obama as politicizing the military, Republicans performed a stunt of galling hypocrisy.

In order to obstruct health reform, Republican senators moved to politicize the nation’s national security by holding the Defense appropriations bill hostage. The Washington Post reported on this “unusual” tactic:

Senate Republicans failed early Friday in their bid to filibuster a massive Pentagon bill that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an unusual move designed to delay President Obama’s health-care legislation. On a 63 to 33 vote, Democrats cleared a key hurdle that should allow them to approve the must-pass military spending bill Saturday and return to the health-care debate. After years of criticizing Democrats for not supporting the troops, just three Republicans supported the military funding.

Explaining his opposition to military appropriations, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) said bluntly, “I don’t want healthcare.”

In their desperate bid to kill health reform, Republicans are using the military as a political football. Not only are they making up a story about a nonexistent base-closure threat, but they tried to hold up the funding of the military as part of a cynical plot to slow the health reform debate.

Media

Who’s “Ideological” in the Health Care Debate?

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 18, 2009 at 4:44 pm

lieberman2 1

Greg Sargent is unhappy with Ron Brownstein:

Ronald Brownstein, for one, is actually trying to claim that Howard Dean opposes the bill because he’s a “wine track” Democrat who doesn’t lack insurance and hence has the luxury to indulge in ideological struggles.

Brownstein writes that Dean and the “digital left” are able to “casually dismiss” the bill because “they operate in an environment where so few people need to worry about access to insurance.” He adds that for these critics, the debate is “largely an abstraction” and merely a crusade to “crush Republicans and ideologically cleanse the Democrats.”

I don’t think this is quite as far off-base as Sargent does. But to whatever extent you think Jane Hamsher is on an anti-pragmatic ideological crusade, any sensible look at things would indicate that Joe Lieberman is about a thousand times more at fault.

The key point here is that insofar as we’re really having an “ideological” dispute about the propriety of private health insurance, then what the left has shown throughout this debate is a willingness to bend extremely far in the direction of accommodation with the status quo. I haven’t seen any prominent progressives arguing that the goal of expanding health insurance needs to be held hostage to the dream of a 100 percent public insurance system. It’s Joe Lieberman who’s been willing to act with callous indifference to the fate of his constituents in order to get his way on a pretty minor point. For one important faction on the left, the removal of any form of public option has been the straw that broke the camel’s back, pushing them into a form of opposition. But that’s because Lieberman destroyed a compromise that was already something like the faded copy of a copy of a copy of the left’s real ideological commitments.

The habit of insisting that only the right and the left have “ideologies” and that people in the center don’t is one of the absolute most frustrating elements of conventional political discussion in the United States. The fact of the matter is that “centrist” ideological taboos have been the big story of the Obama administration. That starts with the imposition of an arbitrary cap on the size of the stimulus bill, it continues to the utterly merciless and fanatical centrist opposition to the existence of any public option, to the Fed’s refusal to undertake further monetary easing, to the unwillingness to contemplate really stern measures against bailed-out banks and their executives, and on and on and on.

Yglesias

Meaningful!

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 18, 2009 at 4:24 pm

White House says they reached a “meaningful” agreement in Copenhagen but don’t yet seem able to articulate what the meaning is.

What’s more, it seems to me that everything is meaningless unless a bill can get through the senate.

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