Not much more to say about what remains the worst bill ever, even without the public insurance option or public funding of abortions, at least until whatever health care reform passes from the Senate/House conference and is signed into law, but I cannot pass commentary on the travesty of the process by which the Democrats reached 60 votes to pass the bill in the Senate. Nothing I have observed in over 40 years comes close to the duplicity and bad faith that was in evidence here on the part of Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership, not to mention every one of the 60 who participated, not one of whom had the courage of conviction to enforce any semblance of integrity in “the world’s greatest deliberative body”. No less a Great Society liberal as David Broder was appalled and wrote: “Reid does what he usually does. He reduced the negotiations to his own level of transactional morality. Incapable of summoning his colleagues to statesmanship, he made the deals look as crass and parochial as many of them were—encasing a historic achievement in a wrapping of payoff and patronage”. This was not “business as usual”. Clay, Webster, Calhoun, even LBJ, would have been ashamed, and all honest observers should be as well. It is being hailed in many quarters as “historic”, but the only think about it that is historic is the arrogance of the majority party. One of our worst hours.
