Reid Gets His 60 Votes for Obamacare - the Chicago Way

Yesterday morning, while Washington, DC was getting blanketed with a record snowfall, Senate Democrats treated the entire United States to what may be the greatest snow job of all time. Biggoverment.com calls it "the most corrupt piece of legislation in our nation's history," and indeed it is.

Senator Ben Nelson agreed to support this massive healthcare restructuring plan which no one besides a few Democrat senators has even seen. The price for his support was 100 percent coverage of increases in Medicaid costs for his home state resulting from the legislation -- now and forevermore. It amounts to a flagrantly unconstitutional subsidy to Nebraska with taxpayer dollars from the other 49 states.

We should have seen this coming. When Senator Max Baucus revealed the Senate Finance Committee's version of the bill this summer, many of his fellow Senators balked. The upshot was that he took the eye-popping, unprecedented step of offering exclusions to the bill's provisions to these Senators' states!

This latest development demonstrates once again that, when it's a choice between principles and dollars, Democratic politicians reliably choose the latter. Nelson, who adamantly insisted he would not support any legislation allowing for federal funding of abortion in the healthcare bill, stoically holding out until the last minute, changed his mind pronto after accepting the Medicaid bribe.

With Nelson's agreement, the Senate has the 60 votes it needs to pass this monstrosity. And despite Senate Republicans' claims of having "a strategy" to stop the bill, they appear to have gone out with a whimper. This is simply disgraceful. Not only was their "strategy" a loser, when Senator DeMint finally did come up with a real strategy, only one Senator, Tom Coburn tried one of its tactics. When he did, the Democrats emasculated it by violating parliamentary rules.

As if to cap this moment of bottomless sleaze and corruption, Senate Majority Leader Reid scheduled the vote on this despicable travesty for 1 am, Monday morning. Either the Democrats are completely out of their minds in defying the will of the American people to pass this overwhelmingly unpopular, inarguably destructive legislation, or they know something we don't.

The Obama administration has saddled us with trillions in new debt to fund the "bailout," the "stimulus," and massive increases in federal spending. Not entirely unnoticed, but largely overlooked anyway, is the fact that much of this taxpayer funded spending paloosa is going to support Democrat constituents in both Democrat and Republican states. That money will very likely return to Democrat coffers later this year. Look for widespread reporting of sudden economic booms in selected sectors of the economy and/or selected geographic areas, providing the illusion of late-breaking resurgence to our economy... just in time for the election.

Now all eyes will move to House Democrat Bart Stupak, who, according to the Politico, is already working behind the scenes to scuttle Nelson's compromise. We'll see. But since no sitting Democrat Congressman or Senator has yet defied the Party leadership when the results turn on their individual decisions, it is doubtful the "pro-life" Stupak will either.

After all, like everything else accomplished by this corrupt fraud of a President and his institutionally corrupt fellow Democrats, this legislation is "historic."