As many of you know full well by now, (D)Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and his group in the House are presenting a significant impediment in getting the votes to pass H.R. 4872, the Bill that reconciles H.R. 3590 passed by the Senate in December and H.R. 3962, passed in the House a month earlier.
I, like some of you, have been reading these Bills since H.R. 3200. I am not going to go into what each Bill says or did say at some point: it's not important, in spite of what Rep. Stupak alludes to by making his stand.
What is important, I feel, is for someone to suggest a plan for a reasonable outcome this Sunday at three o' clock when, quite probably the whole World will be watching to see what we Americans and their first African American President in its brief History will actually do.
A plan like the following:
First, what do we have here?
We started out with H.R. 3200 before last August. I think we know what happened. To make a long story short, H.R. 3200 left the House in November of 2009 as H.R. 3962. It went to the Senate and left that body as H.R. 3590 in December.
Some other things happened since then many of you already know all too well. What we have right now in addition to the now famous Strother Martin line from the film "Cool Hand Luke"
What we have here...is a failure to communicate
In other words we have a Bill in the House, H.R. 4872 that:
...amends the Senate Bill in joint, direct and inverse relation from the greatest common general circumstance of H.R. 3590 or H.R. 3962 to the least common individual result of H.R. 3590 and H.R. 3962 integration.
Whew!
I know that's a mouthful but what the author in the quote is trying to do is ask a question: what's the real skinny here underneath Rep. Stupak's reticence or to be more precise, what could possibly be the structure of his concerns?
For instance, before there was H.R.3200 there was H.R. 676 the National United Health Care Act or Improved Medicare for all Act introduced January 26, 2009. Without looking up the actual text, I think it's safe to assume, parts of that Bill found its way into H.R. 3200. Maybe the key to Stupak is somewhere between H.R. 676 and H.R. 3200.
I am guessing here, but in it's nascent stages, from January to June or July of 2009, the federal funding for abortion language, interpreted more than read from between the lines of the current Bill by Rep. Stupak, was not there or did Rep Stupak miss it in the Bill's previous manifestations from Jan through June?
Maybe Rep. Stupak's concerns are not disingenuous. Let's assume for a moment, that Rep. Bart Stupak is a reasonable man. In that case, if the language of H.R. 676 through to H.R. 3200 and then H.R. 3962 was more specific regarding the issue Rep. Stupak is most concerned with, then why not "cut and paste" the jist of that language from the Bill's previous forms into H.R. 4872 currently on the floor?
In this instance, Rep. Stupak's Enrollment Corrections concerns could be directly addressed because the assurances he and his group are looking for would come from the previous incarnations of the legislation, neither Rep. Stupak nor the members of his contingent took any notable issue with from January through September of 2009.
Then again, if they did, why didn't Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin or Sean Hannity focus so heavily on so called "death panels" and their ole standy-by: "No Government run health care." If the language pertaining to federal funded abortions was problematic, why didn't the Conservative Right-Wing Imaginatorium of instant truths take the obvious opportunity for more press underscoring their position at the time?
Surely that would have been the Machiavellian thing to do and they have played the Machiavelli book, a la bread and circus fast food rumor-mill, book, page and verse, like Isaac Stern played a Stradivarius.
But more importantly, if the language was problematic, then why didn't Rep Stupak object then? On the other hand, there may not have been an issue with the language of the Bill, until that is, H.R. 3962 of the House became H.R. 3590 of the Senate.
The veracity of the former statement would of course depend on whether or not Rep. Stupak is an honorable man who believes that what he is doing is right. If he is not, we need go no further and Sunday may be a dark day indeed for the American middle class.
On the other hand, if the latter statement is correct, then why not cut and paste whatever was in H.R. 676, H.R. 3200 and H.R. 3962 into Rep Stupak's Enrollment Corrections Bill/ H.R. 4872, especially if there is language in all three Bills that is not found in H.R. 3590 and hence, not part of the current Reconciliation process?
What is going to happen Sunday? The only people who know are those Democrats in the House along with Rep. Stupak who continue to find it hard to trust that the Senate will fulfill their end of the bargain when push comes to shove.
Although there is no magic word or phrase to instantly make these concerns go away, CBO, Debt reduction, plans to put out of work Americans to work in a newly revitalized Health Care industry, all pale in comparison to those four words many of us are supposed to believe in.
Whether we are cab drivers or Congressmen or women:
el pluribus unum..from many, one...in God We Trust
Do we really? Personally, I tend to take the stand that we do, or at least I like to think I do. I can't speak for rich man representatives who stick to their guns the way General Armstrong Custer stuck to his comic books.
Along with the rest of middle class America these days, Sunday will come and Sunday will go while I can only wonder, what will I have to give up tomorrow I can neither afford to keep or lose today?