“Jam through”? After a year?
  -Truly amazing what they can get away with, sometimes. After a year of every kind of legislative foot-dragging ever contrived, after encouraging the synthetic tea partiers to disrupt and to derail genuine discussion, how at this stage can any officeholder say that Obama and/or Democrats in Congress are trying to ‘jam through’ health care legislation?

Sen. Lamar Alexander did it today, on ABC’s This Week, with Elizabeth Vargas this week.



They tried it during the Thursday summit gathering at Blair House, too.

Regrettably, Bob Schieffer on this morning’s Meet the Press set up–framed–the discussion in exactly the GOP way: “less government” versus “more government.” That wd be the GOP representing ‘less’ and Dems ‘more.’ Schieffer did not get around to mentioning that our enormous insurance companies are regulated only at the state level.

His GOP panelists, Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Sen. Tom Coburn, stuck to the same-old. Admittedly Blackburn said “look at starting again,” instead of just “start over,” but it’s the same thought.

There is no realistic possibility that ‘start over’ means anything but QUIT, of course. But the Repubs’ only proposal, aside from what they call tort reform–i.e. preventing any American from ever being able to sue any corporation over any injury–is to allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines. They tend not to mention that this is often prohibited precisely by the states whose regulation they are now busily touting.

Of course, they also don’t mention that Republicans in state governments, and the lobbyists who put them there, have spent decades and billions trying to prevent any viable regulation of the insurance industry at the state level.