Megan McArdle (emphasis added):

But there is one thing of which I am nearly perfectly certain: If we pass this thing, no American politician, left or right, is going to cut any of these programs, or raise the broad-based taxes necessary to pay for them, without any compensating goodies to offer the public . . . until the crisis is almost upon us. I can think of no situation, other than impending crisis, in which such a thing has been done–and usually, as with Social Security, they have done just little enough to kick the problem down the road.  The idea that you pass a program of dubious sustainability because you can always make it sustainable later, seems borderline insane. I can’t think of a single major entitlement that has become more sustainable over time.  Why is this one supposed to be different?

I agree with everything except the word “borderline.”

Yuval Levin, on the latest CBO score:

All of the spending laid out by CBO yesterday (more than $2.4 trillion in the first decade of the program’s full operation) will certainly happen if the bill is enacted, but many of the offsets are very unlikely to happen. The bill would leave it to another president and Congress, in 2018, to impose a tax on “Cadillac” health-care plans — a tax whose definition of “Cadillac” would grow much more slowly than the cost of coverage, so that more and more people would be covered by it every year. Why should we expect a future Congress and president to make such a politically painful move if the present Congress and president won’t do it? It would also leave it to the next Congress to drastically cut physician pay in Medicare — even as today’s Congress refuses to make much more modest cuts, and so wants to pass a “doc fix” that will cost more than $300 billion. Simply everybody knows this cut won’t happen, and as the CBO (with its customary bureaucratic understatement) has put it: “the long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if key provisions of the bill were ultimately changed or not fully implemented.” This is not fiscal responsibility; it’s not even naïveté or self-delusion. It’s just plain dishonesty.

David Brooks:

But [Obama] has been so sucked into the system that now he stands by while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about passing health care via “deem and pass” — a tricky legislative device in which things get passed without members having the honor or the guts to stand up and vote for it.

Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

Props to Tunku Varadarajan, apparently the first to say this maneuver sounds like “demon pass.”  It’s what we’ve come to.

While much of the discussion about health care has focused on the lack of 60 Democratic votes in the Senate, the House may pose an even bigger obstacle.  For legislative process geeks, John Podhoretz explains the coming maneuvers.  First the House has to pass the Senate bill, with the understanding that there would then be discussions on a second, “reconciliation” bill (normally just used for budget matters) that “fixes what’s wrong with the first bill.”

It appears that, in an effort to make this as easy as possible on the Senate, the House is now under pressure from the Senate and the White House to vote for the reconciliation bill before the Senate. At which point the Senate will take it up and ramrod through the second bill with 51 votes, Obama signs it, and there’s health-care.

This strategy requires the House not only to vote for a wildly unpopular bill once, but then to vote on its sequel almost immediately afterward. In other words, House members are going to be forced to cast two wildly unpopular, highly visible votes in succession, without anybody else taking the heat. And there is going to be deal-making and back-scratching and all manner of sleazy behavior to achieve it, all of which will just increase the public sense of a corrupt process that has ensnared Democrats just as corruption seemed to ensnare Republicans in 2006. All so the Senate can sneak it through. And the House has good reason not to trust that the Senate will hold to its part of the bargain. What if there is a colossal meltdown in public support just before the reconciliation vote? What if the Senate decides to change it a little and throws it all back into chaos again? What if House members were to cast two votes and there was no health care at the end of the process?

…Thus, the best hope of derailing health care will not derive from high motives – stopping this dreadful measure before it becomes law — but rather very low motives — sheer, panicked self-preservation on the part of Democratic pols hoping against hope to hold on in spite of the looming Republican wave.

And remember, the House only had a five-vote margin when it passed its own version of health care “reform” last year.

Disregard all the talk about the process being “broken.”  This is checks-and-balances as the Framers intended.  It’s supposed to be hard to pass sweeping legislation.

These days I self-identify as a Republican, but some of my best friends are Democrats.  Actually, as a function of the town where I live, virtually all of my best friends are Democrats.

So on behalf of my friends and on behalf of simple civility, I hereby call on all Republicans everywhere to abandon the contemptuous use of “Democrat” as an adjective.  If you need a handy analogy to understand why references such as “Democrat leaders” or “the Democrat Party” are offensive, consider the difference between the phrases, “he’s a Jewish boy” and “he’s a Jew boy.”  Or, if the problem is not that you are obnoxious, but rather merely that you are ignorant, a quick glance at the party’s official homepage will confirm that the correct usage is “Democratic Party.”

I associate the misuse of the term with Bob Dole, who famously made an ill-received reference to “Democrat wars” in his vice presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1976.  [Interestingly, Wikipedia’s lengthy entry tracing the ignoble history of “Democrat Party (phrase)” doesn’t mention Dole.  But I digress.]

All of this came to mind as I prepared to approvingly post a passage by Andrew McCarthy in The Corner, describing why he believes the Democrats will use unusual parliamentary tactics to force through a health care bill opposed by a majority of Americans.  My annoyance at the first few words below caused me to spin off on this lexicographic tangent:

In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you’ve calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

I admire McCarthy, and I note that earlier in the very same paragraph (before the bit I quoted), he properly uses the term “Democratic leadership.”  So I’m choosing to interpret this as a typo.

I also hope his analysis is incorrect, and that the desire for re-election will sway enough Democrats [note correct usage of noun form] to sink Obamacare.  But I fear he may be right.

I couldn’t be bothered to watch the seven-plus-hour health care summit yesterday (given my new full-time job and all), but I still care about the subject.  Count on the blogosphere and the punditocracy to plow through all the raw material and offer up the best bits.

Hat tip to Peter Wehner at Commentary for flagging a strong performance by GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. The six-minute clip above is worth watching — Ryan offers a fact-based, forceful-yet-respectful explanation of the impossible economics of Obamacare.

Don’t have six minutes?  Here’s a transcript of Ryan’s remarks, via the Washington Post‘s very helpful, comprehensive library of transcripts from every speaker.  And if you don’t want to bother with the transcript, here’s a sample (emphasis mine):

Look, we agree on the problem here. And the problem is health inflation is driving us off of a fiscal cliff.

Mr. President, you said health care reform is budget reform. You’re right. We agree with that. Medicare, right now, has a $38 trillion unfunded liability. That’s $38 trillion in empty promises to my parents’ generation, our generation, our kids’ generation. Medicaid’s growing at 21 percent each year. It’s suffocating states’ budgets. It’s adding trillions in obligations that we have no means to pay for it. …

And if you take a look at the CBO analysis, analysis from your chief actuary, I think it’s very revealing. This bill does not control costs. This bill does not reduce deficits. Instead, this bill adds a new health care entitlement at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have.

The one-minute clip below is also nice — via Did I Miss Something.  The unlikely pair of Arianna Huffington and George Will reach an agreement, of sorts, on the best tactical approach for Democrats now.

Doesn’t the debate on Obamacare seem so last week already? This morning I tried to force myself to pay attention to today’s steel-cage Kabuki match at the White House.  I got as far as the headlines on the Washington Post homepage (highlighting mine).

Just as a matter of politics, I fail to understand why the administration is so intent on enacting, during an election year, legislation that is so overwhelmingly unpopular.  David Brooks, who generally admires Obama, gives the gruesome numbers:

If you average the last 10 polls, 38 percent of voters support the reform plans and 53 percent oppose. Obama’s reform is more unpopular than Bill Clinton’s was as it died.