Selling Her Soul for $100-300 Million

Here we see a picture of Senator Landrieu negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Photo: How the Senate Works

OK, technically, it isn't, but despite her claims to the contrary, this is exactly what it looks like to quite a few of us. Actually, this is more like Standard Operating Proceedure for a huge number of our elected representatives, on both sides of the aisle.

For the vote Saturday on Reid's version of ObamaCare in support of cloture on the motion to proceed to this bill she wasn't the only 1. As Dana Milbank said in the WaPo article about it "Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) won a promise from Reid to support his plan to expand eligibility for health insurance. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) got Reid to jettison a provision stripping health insurers of their antitrust exemption. Landrieu got the concessions for her money. And (Blanche) Lincoln (D-Ark.) won an extended, 72-hour period to study legislation."

In this case, she is a Catholic who voted Saturday for bringing out a bill that a recent letter from the USCCB called "an enormous disappointment, creating new and completely unacceptable federal policy that endangers human life and rights of conscience."

I know that several were using the argument that this was merely a vote to bring the bill up for debate. But by doing so, it now only needs 50 votes to pass & be sent to a joint committee for reconciliation with the House bill. Although, since this is a spending/revenue bill, as I currently see it, this bill shouldn't even have been brought up. The Constitution requires those bills to originate in the House & only allows the Senate to amend them. & even if they did gut a spending bill from the House & amend it to contain this instead, 2000+ pages isn't exactly what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they allowed amendments.

That aside, the courageous thing to do would have to have said NO! This would have forced them to go back & start over, hopefully this time coming up with something that would deal only with the needed problems that don't require this complete overhaul/government takeover to accomplish.

Instead Landrieu has prostituted herself while being able to claim innocence because she can claim she didn't vote to provide federal funds for abortion, just to debate it. When the final vote comes up she will be able to vote no for a bill that will pass that wouldn't have even come up if she had done the right thing in the 1st place.

Source: Sweeteners for the South

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Added 23 Nov 2009 12:30 am: Just found out that last night's vote was to amend H.R. 3590 with Reid's 2,074 page health care proposal. So using the letter of the law they have done an endrun arround the Constitution since H.R.3590 is a bill "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes. " It was passed by the House on 8 October as a 4 page bill.