Despite His Campaign Promises, Obama Doesn’t Care About Bi-Partisanship On Health Care
Remember when, during his inauguration, Obama called for a new era of bi-partisanship? Remember when he said “Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long?” I do.
It’s too bad he didn’t mean it.
July 14 (Bloomberg)—President Barack Obama may rely only on Democrats to push health-care legislation through the U.S. Congress if Republican opposition doesn’t yield soon, two of the president’s top advisers said.
“Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior political strategist, said during an interview in his White House office. “If we’re going to get this thing done, obviously time is a-wasting.”
Both Axelrod and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said taking a partisan route to enacting major health-care legislation isn’t the president’s preferred choice. Yet in separate interviews, each man left that option open.
“We’d like to do it with the votes of members of both parties,” Axelrod said. “But the worst result would be to not get health-care reform done.”
By any means necessary, right? Of course, we’ve known this is how it was going to be for a while. Ever since Obama started pushing the Senate to use the budget reconciliaiton process, which bypasses the 60 vote filibuster margin, to pass government health care. And that’s exactly what I’m assuming these statements from the Obama administration mean.
They’re going to try and get government health care passed without subjecting it to the full 60 votes. Which is not only baloney because government health care means massive changes to the way each and every one of us lives our lives and thus deserves to be exposed to the full debate and scrutiny of the Senate, but also baloney because Obama promised unity and bipartisanship.
I guess those are just things Obama said to get elected.
