GOP starts the show

So much for the “nuclear” Senate showdown.

After President Barack Obama’s showy Tuesday signing ceremony, the Senate’s cleanup work this week on health care is looking more like a political strategy session, as each party tries to cement public impressions of the bill.

“It’s going to pass here,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said matter-of-factly. “It’s a matter of what amendments [Democrats] want to be for and what they’re not.”

To be sure, Republicans have lined up a bundle of politically embarrassing amendments and plan to wreak all sorts of procedural havoc.

“I think there’s going to be long nights, and there’s going to be anger and demagoguery from the Republicans,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “But I think the outcome is pretty clear.”

So at this point, Republicans are simply going to continue with their key themes: that the new law will drastically cut Medicare, increase taxes and expand the government’s ballooning budget deficit.

And as Democrats try to downplay the bill as mere “fixes” to the law and vow to kill all GOP amendments, Republicans are inflating the measure’s importance by arguing it would make even more draconian changes to the newly enacted law.

GOP gears up for Senate theatrics – Manu Raju – POLITICO.com.

Healthcare reform can't wait a generation

The end game at hand, President Barack Obama took command Wednesday of one final attempt by Democrats to enact bitterly contested health care legislation, calling for an “up or down vote” within weeks under rules denying Republicans the ability to kill the bill with mere talk.

Appearing before a White House audience of invited guests, many of them wearing white medical coats, Obama firmly rejected calls from Republicans to draft new legislation from scratch. “I don’t see how another year of negotiations would help. Moreover, the insurance companies aren’t starting over,” the president said, referring to a recent round of announced premium increases affecting millions who purchase individual coverage.

While Obama said he wanted action within a few weeks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., seemed to hint a final outcome could take far longer. “We remain committed to this effort and we’ll use every option available to deliver meaningful reform this year,” he said.

The results will affect nearly every American, mandating major changes in the ways they receive and pay for health care or leaving in place current systems that leave tens of millions with no coverage and many others dissatisfied with what they do get. With Republicans united in opposition, there is no certainty about the outcome in Congress – or even that Democrats will go along with changes Obama urged on Wednesday in what he described as a bipartisan gesture.

via Obama Health Care Speech: It’s Time To Act.

Screw Um

The House voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to repeal the antitrust exemption currently granted to health insurance companies.

The vote was 406-19 to repeal the exemption, which has been in place since the end of World War II. The 19 who voted against the repeal are all Republicans.

Liberal Democrats have said a repeal would help inject new competition into the health care industry while reducing consumer costs.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that President Barack Obama strongly supports the repeal. “At its core, health reform is all about ensuring that American families and businesses have more choices, benefit from more competition and have greater control over their own health care,” Gibbs said.

“Repealing this exemption is an important part of that effort.

Gibbs said the president is not seeking repeal of the exemption in lieu of broader changes to the insurance market. “This is a complementary step along the way,” he told reporters.

The debate in the House on Wednesday included a colorful moment between Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-New York, and Republicans.

“You guys have chutzpah,” Weiner told Republicans during the debate.

“The Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry,” he said, drawing the objections of Republicans, who asked that his words be stricken from the record.

Weiner then asked for unanimous consent to replace his words and said, “Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.”

The Republicans objected again, prompting Weiner to rescind his words.

The House version of the health care bill passed last year would have removed the antitrust exemption, while the Senate’s version would not.

Advocates of an exemption repeal say that the exemption has allowed health insurance companies to essentially divide the country into geographic zones. They argue the companies benefit from what amounts to local monopolies.

Industry defenders, in turn, point out that insurers are still subject to state regulations. They claim the impact of an exemption repeal is overblown.

Administration officials and their allies in Congress have taken an increasingly tough stance against the unpopular insurance industry. Among other things, Obama’s latest proposal for health care reform would give the federal government new authority to block excessive rate hikes by health insurers.

Specifically, Obama’s plan calls for the secretary of health and human services to work with a seven-member board made up of doctors, economists, and consumer and insurance representatives to review premium hikes.

The board – to be known as the Health Insurance Rate Authority – would provide an annual report to recommend to states whether certain rate increases should be approved, although the secretary could overrule state insurance regulators.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – House votes to repeal antitrust exemption for health insurers « – Blogs from CNN.com.

Mark Williams, the conservative talk radio host who has become a prominent spokesman for the Tea Party Express, sent an email in September — obtained by TPMmuckraker — to other leaders of the group, in which he appeared to be responding to charges of racism against himself.

Wrote Williams:

CNN went over more than seven thousand articles on my site; likely they also listened to the shows archived there too. No doubt they did a Lexis Nexis on me and found thirty years of work by and about me. The best that they could do as a result was string together three quotes, out of context, and throw in a false allegation of me calling Obama a “Nazi”.I was in the streets marching for civil rights while asshole southern sheriffs were swinging nail studded baseball bats at black’s heads, and stood between black kids and even more fucked up northern assholes were throwing rocks and gas bombs at school buses in my hometown during forced busing for deseg.

Two things you can always count on: I will defend my record on race to no one (sic), under any circumstances and, I will call out any racist, any time without regard to who they are … and that includes our half white, racist president.

The Sacramento-based Williams has made frequent media appearances as a spokesman and leader of the Tea Party Express, which was created last year by a GOP consulting firm. He has written in the past that President Obama is “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief.”

via Tea Party Leader On Obama: ‘Our Half White, Racist President’ | TPMMuckraker.

Limited rate hikes

President Barack Obama will propose giving federal authorities the power to limit rate hikes by health insurance companies – part of a new health care overhaul plan he will unveil Monday in a last-ditch bid to salvage his signature issue.

The proposal would give the federal Health and Human Services Department – in conjunction with state authorities – the power to deny egregious premium increases, roll them back, or demand rebates for consumers, said a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because details have not yet been officially released.

Recent premium hikes of as much as 39 percent sought by Anthem Blue Cross in California have given Obama a new argument for his sweeping health care remake, stalled in Congress since Democrats lost their 60th Senate seat in a special election last month in Massachusetts.

The proposal for tighter oversight of insurers, modeled on legislation proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., will be part of a sweeping overhaul plan which the White House plans to post on its Web site at 10 a.m. Monday, ahead of a health care summit with congressional leaders of both parties on Thursday.

The broader plan, likely to be opposed by the GOP, is expected to require most Americans to carry health insurance coverage, with federal subsidies to help many afford the premiums. Hewing close to a stalled Senate bill, it would bar insurance companies from denying coverage to people with medical problems or charging them more. The expected price tag is around $1 trillion over 10 years.

The summit at Blair House, the White House guest residence, will be televised live on C-SPAN and perhaps on cable news networks. It represents a risky and unusual gamble by the administration that Obama can save his embattled overhaul through persuasion – on live TV.

It was forced on the administration by the Senate special election victory of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown in January. He captured the seat long held by Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, who died last year. Brown’s victory reduced the Democrats’ majority in the Senate to 59 votes, one shy of the number needed to knock down Republican delaying tactics.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday he would participate, but insisted Obama and congressional Democrats would be wrong to push the bills they wrote in the House and Senate.

via Obama Health Care Bill: President To Propose Insurance Rate Limits.

A Trap? What? Really?

First he called congressional Democrats’ yearlong march toward health care overhaul an ugly process. Now President Barack Obama wants to talk directly with Republicans, the very people his Capitol Hill allies call obstinate and uncooperative.

It’s no wonder Democratic lawmakers are less than enthusiastic about Obama’s overture to the GOP.

The president has blamed special deals cut on Capitol Hill for the public’s skepticism about health care legislation, distancing himself from what he’s called “this Congress,” even though his White House was closely involved in the process. For their part, some congressional Democrats clamored for stronger leadership from Obama after an upset loss in a special election last month denied Democrats their filibuster-proof Senate majority, plunging the health overhaul into disarray.

But with the legislation languishing, the bipartisan health care summit Obama has set for later this month almost has to break the logjam, even if neither Democrats nor Republicans are particularly excited about it. Either the two parties come together against all odds or the event demonstrates that no bipartisan outcome is possible, spurring Democrats to act alone. Or, the summit is a bust and the entire health care overhaul falls apart.

“I think this is sort of his last-ditch effort” at a bipartisan deal, said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.

“Unless there’s a dramatic change by the Republicans, I don’t think that we’ll see much change,” Miller said. But, he added, “the president believes this is important. I don’t disagree with what he’s trying to do.”

Democrats see a few scenarios that could emerge from the Feb. 25 event, planned as a half-day televised forum. Details on attendees and format remain scant.

via Obama Health Care Summit: Democrats Skeptical Of Meeting With GOP.

Speaking to reporters shortly after he met with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders, Obama said that he informed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that he would “consider” such a course of action if the GOP obstructionism continued.

“In our meeting I asked the congressional leadership to put a stop to these holds in which nominees for critical jobs are denied a vote for month,” he said. “Surely we can set aside partisanship and do what’s traditionally been done with these nominations.”

“If the Senate does not act, and I made this very clear,” Obama continued, “I will consider making several recess appointments during the upcoming recess because we can’t afford to let politics stand in the way of a well functioning government.”

On Tuesday, one of those nominees — Craig Becker, who Obama appointed to sit on the National Labor Relations Board — is slated to come up for a vote Senate. His confirmation was thrown into serious doubt recently when Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) indicated he would vote against cloture. Should Obama appoint Becker to the post through a recess appointment, he would be able to serve until the end of 2011 before requiring re-confirmation.

Noting the length that some nominations have been held up in Congress as well as the blanket hold that Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) placed on all presidential nominees last week, Obama called on lawmakers to “get past the tired debates that have plagued our politics.”

Obama Warns GOP He Will Use Recess Appointments.

Transparent Now

President Barack Obama is planning to host a televised meeting with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders on health care reform.

The Feb. 25 meeting is an attempt to reach across the aisle but not a signal that the president plans to start over, as Republicans have demanded, a White House official said.

“I want to come back [after the Presidents Day congressional recess] and have a large meeting — Republicans and Democrats — to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” Obama said in an interview with Katie Couric during CBS’s Super Bowl pre-game show Sunday.

Obama said he wants to “look at the Republican ideas that are out there.”

“If we can go, step by step, through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, then, procedurally, there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster the process took last year,” he said.

In a statement, the official said, “What the president will not do is let this moment slip away. He hopes to have Republican support in doing so — but he is going to move forward on health reform.”

Jobs and how to create them

Republicans sparred with President Barack Obama in their Saturday media addresses over proposals to create jobs, further evidence of the difficulty of bipartisan solutions to the nation’s pressing problems.

Obama pushed Congress to use $30 billion that had been set aside to bail out Wall Street to start a new program that provides loans to small businesses, which the White House calls the engine for job growth. Republicans, meanwhile, taunted Obama with a familiar refrain: Where are the jobs the president promised in exchange for the billions of dollars already spent?

The barb came a day after the government reported an unexpected decline in the unemployment rate, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. It was the first drop in seven months but offered little consolation for the 8.4 million jobs that have vanished since the recession began.

“Even though our economy is growing again, these are still tough times for America,” Obama said. “Too many businesses are still shuttered. Too many families can’t make ends meet. And while yesterday, we learned that the unemployment rate has dropped below 10 percent for the first time since summer, it is still unacceptably high — and too many Americans still can’t find work.”

To help the recovery, Obama asked Congress to use leftover money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, to provide to small banks so they can make more loans to small businesses. Republicans have criticized the move, arguing any money leftover from the bailout should be used to reduce the budget deficit.

more……

Obama Weekly Address: Obama Spars With GOP Over Job Creation (VIDEO).