Dems prepare to defy American voters by passing Obamacare via reconciliation

On Friday, President Obama officially invited Republicans to his February 25th health-care summit:

The invitations have gone out to leadership in both parties to attend Barack Obama’s ostensibly bipartisan summit on health care.  Is this the event of the social season, a political debate, or Kabuki theater?  Depending on who answers, it seems that no one is quite sure what to expect from any of the participants, assuming the debate takes place at all.

Many Republicans fear that this summit will be nothing more than political theater aimed at helping provide cover for the President and Democrats in Congress as they continue to work behind closed doors to come up with a plan to pass Obamacare via budget reconciliation.

The format that the White House has laid out has done little to alleviate Republican fears.  After opening remarks by President Obama, followed by a Republican and a Democrat, President Obama will moderate a discussion among the 37 law makers invited to the meeting.  Considering what the President has invested in the Democratic bill, along with the deals he has cut with union leaders, Pharma and the insurance industry, many don’t feel he can be an impartial moderator.

Making matters worse is the fact that the White House and Congressional Democrats have not been able to keep quiet the fact they continue to work on a compromise bill between House and Senate Democrats, along with trying to win the support of 51 Senators, which is needed to ram Obamacare through via reconciliation.

In fact, on the same day that President Obama sent out his summit invitations, a Democratic member of the Senate said the decision has been made to proceed with reconciliation:

“I think a decision has just been made — we’re just going to go ahead” with a reconciliation bill, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, told reporters on Friday.

All indications are that the Democrat’s strategy is to have their compromise bill, along with a reconciliation plan, ready to go prior to the Health-Care Summit on February 25th.

Then on the 25th, President Obama will hold his summit, which will have been carefully orchestrated to showcase the revised health care bill that the White House, Congressional Democrats and special interest groups have been working on behind closed doors for nearly two months.   Once the summit is over, they will be able to say, “we had the meeting, we tried to get Republican support, but they still want to do nothing but obstruct health care reform.  We have no choice but to pass health care reform by using reconciliation.”

This is all political theater, because if the White House and Democratic leaders were truly interested in coming up with a bipartisan solution, they wouldn’t be continuing to work on their partisan bill behind closed doors, and they wouldn’t have already made the decision to proceed with reconciliation.

Scott Brown ran in Massachusetts by saying, “I will be the 41st vote to stop the Senate health care bill.”  That promise resulted in nearly two thirds of the independents in the bluest of blue states voting for a Republican.  Add to that, poll after poll shows that the American public is not happy with the Democrat’s health care bills.

There can be no doubt left that the majority of Americans don’t want the Democrat’s health care bill, which they continue to work on in the back rooms of the White House and Congress.

Democrats are betting on the fact that voters have very short memories, as the mid-term elections are less than nine months away.