There are any number of House bills that were duly passed in the last few months that happen to deal with handling the individual mandate. Including, I believe, one from September 30th, which in retrospect is a deal that Mark Begich, Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and Jeanne Shaheen (at the very least) kind of wish that the Senate Majority Leader had taken, given that Reid is playing fire with their political careers right now. At any rate: if the Senate decides to pursue an individual mandate delay anyway, well, the House has done its job; now let Harry Reid do his, and hammer it all out in conference the way it’s supposed to be done.
He can also send the House an apology for the delay, but that observation is made merely so that Reid can never pretend that nobody ever told him what proper, civilized behavior entails. I will allow myself to be content with seeing the Senate Majority Leader take up any one of those bills that he swore to never, ever take up…
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Yup, I know that Reid would have to strip out from any particular House shutdown bill a lot of language involving said shutdown that no longer applies. What, you want to let him not have to play legislative games now? If he can engage in procedural shenanigans to advance his narrow hyper-partisan interests, then Harry Reid can darn well also do that to get himself out of the hole that he and the rest of the Democratic party busily dug for themselves.
PPS: If they’re working on this, they’re not working on, say, an immigration bill. I note this as somebody who’s a squish on the subject: how many of our regular readers WANT Congress working on an immigration bill right now?
*sips coffee*
Harry Reid is busy making up stories about Republicans insulting Obama, demonizing them while denying the need for entitlement reform and obstructing any efforts to fix numerous messes the last 7 years of his reign have inflicted on the nation and his party.
And taking payoffs and bribes from wealthy bundlers and constituents…Allegedly.
Also, Reid might not be able to check his ‘in-box’ as “If you’re over age 50, the internet is something that you’re just learning about.” And he is well over 50…
And don’t forget that Reid has never refuted the allegations that he is a pederast.
A majority of the voting population kept these jokers in power.
It’s doubtful the leopards will change their spots, and it’s an open question as to whether the voters will finally decide to hold them accountable in the next go-round.
.
I’m not optimistic about either possibility.
Of course, Reid will never take up any of those bills. But on the off-chance he does, modifying any one of them would necessitate a conference committee. At which point I think Boehner should state, very publicly, that the House Republicans will not be appointing any conferees:
.
“We’ve moved from trying to defund it, to trying to delay it, to trying to delay only the most damaging parts of it. At every step, we’ve been told that we’re sore losers who can’t abide by the legislative process, that Obamacare is the law of the land, and we’ll just have to deal with that. Now Senator Reid wants to try some of the changes we suggested. Unfortunately for him, we’ve learned our lesson. We will not pursue any changes to Obamacare until after the beginning of the next Congress, and we will resist any efforts from the Senate to change any part of it. Senator Reid decided a month ago that winning a political victory over us was more important than attempting to ameliorate the effects of a bad law. We trust the American people will remember that, and also remember that we are only holding him to the consequences of his own choice.”
.
Boehner saying anything like that would be a dream for me. Sadly, he’ll never get the chance. Not so sadly, he won’t get it because Reid’s too stubborn to let him — so he’ll never need to say it. Which is probably for the best, because I’m sure that Reid would slam the House GOP for being obstructionist, and the media being what it is, they might make it stick. On the other hand, it would be fun to watch the cognitive dissonance among the more intelligent leftist commentators, bloggers, and commenters as they tried to square Reid’s circle…
Most of them are postmodernists.
They don’t need to square the circle when they can just abandon the previous narrative.
Well, I did say the “more intelligent” ones. In my experience, being a postmodernist all but excludes one from that category. They may have a reputation for intelligence, but only because they have 1) the habit of qualifying even the simplest statements of fact and 2) a gift for using language to obscure even the simplest ideas. People who know what real intelligence is, however, are not likely to mistake their gibberish for the genuine article.
After this year’s elections the House should draw up a bill that Delays Obamacare until August of next year, Repeals the Medical Device Tax, Approves Keystone Pipeline, and includes a Resolution declaring in whatever language Boehner prefers that Harry Reid is an unequivocal moron.
They’ve got enough votes in the Senate to pass something like that right now. ( Over Reid’s objections) and Obama may or may not sign it.