Ahead Of Bipartisan Health Care Summit, GOP Has One Plan: Start Over

"I and my Republican colleagues have called for the White House discussion on Feb. 25 to begin with a clean sheet of paper, rather than starting with the massive (and massively unpopular) bills passed by Congress."

No. Is that clear enough for you? Now grow up and at least pretend that you have an interest in doing something besides defeating Obama. Just imagine that you're trying to do something to help millions of Americans who can't afford health insurance now and the many more millions who will be losing coverage every year without reform.

Listen, jackass, you had lots of time to offer your own ideas for this health care reform bill. It's not our fault that you spent that time running around lying your ass off about the bill and telling everyone that reform wasn't needed. And, from all the things that were suggested by Republicans as improvements to the bill, 160 amendments were added to it. It still didn't get Republican support. Republicans had their say and they got more consideration than they deserved. Now please shut the hell up.

I don't see how the Republicans can to anything but get their asses handed to them at this thing. They're not going to be able to hide behind Faux News framing. If all they do is sit there and chant "start over" and offer no actual suggestions it will be painfully obvious to anyone watching that they're not the least bit interested in actual progress.

As Ezra Klein pointed out today Republican have no incentive to compromise or negotiate because they have been incredibly successful in gaining concessions while at the same time potentially gaining political advantage this fall by NOT compromising or negotiating.

"But the difficulty with this discussion is that the GOP has accidentally hit upon a brilliant insight: The best way to guarantee substantive concessions is to refuse to compromise. Think about the plan that Barack Obama and the Democrats have been left with: It's not single payer. There's no public option. It doesn't cover all of the uninsured. It doesn't change the insurance of about 90 percent of the country. It doesn't add to the deficit. It pays for itself with difficult, unpopular and necessary reforms in entitlement programs. It includes a commission to make future reforms of Medicare and Medicaid both easier and less politically dangerous for Republicans.”

“In fact, the Senate health-care bill looks a lot like Wyden-Bennett -- but smaller, and more incremental, and more respectful of the status quo. That is to say, it looks like a more traditionally conservative incarnation of Wyden-Bennett. And it got that way not because Republicans compromised, but because they didn't compromise.”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/the_republicans_genius_comprom.html

So here we are; Democrats propose a basically conservative bill and the Republicans say "nope, gotta start over”. And by killing a conservative bill they hope to gain in November by saying that Democrats couldn’t get anything done because they were not bipartisan enough.

Does anyone else start laughing uncontrollably when a member of the GOP refers to wanting to "offer our ideas"?

So that's the GOP plan? To keep saying "the American people want us to scrap the current plan" until someone actually believes it? 70% want a do over Grassley? Seriously? Every poll I've seen where people were asked about the specifics of the plan came out in favor of it. I can't wait until tomorrow. The GOP will be there in body but not in spirit and it's going to be as plain as day because they're not bringing anything to the table. They can't say they haven't been listened to anymore, they can't say they've been shut out of the process anymore, and they won't be able to lie about the contents of the bill because they'll be in front of the cameras and Obama who relishes calling them out on their crap. They'll have to put up or shut up.