Word: billings
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Efforts to enact sweeping health care reform date back to the presidency of Harry Truman, and attempts have been made under presidents ranging from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, whose disastrous failure to enact reform in 1993 resulted in the Republicans regaining control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. The House’s passage of health insurance reform thus marks the farthest that the reform effort has ever come, for which we congratulate Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her pragmatism and extraordinary political acumen...
...only did the speaker demonstrate the savvy that garnered her the speaker’s gavel in the first place by wrangling the votes to pass a bill whose epitaph pundits had been composing since the notorious town hall protests of Congress’ August recess, but she also, as columnist Camille Paglia wrote for Salon, “conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before...
However, the process of creating the legislation Pelosi worked so hard to pass is less than perfect and in dire need of reform. The fact that few legislators had actually read the contents of the House bill prior to its passage and the sheer haste of the bill’s composition are detrimental to our system of governance. Legislation that as impactful and permanent as this ought to be carefully deliberated upon and debated, not hastily patched together to meet artificial deadlines...
This imperfect process lends itself to unnecessary politicization and the abuse of earmarks so rampant in Congress. One example of this includes the $10 billion allocated in the House bill for unions, a political earmark that has no place in a bill devoted to reforming our health care delivery system. Another example is the Stupak Amendment. The bill that the House passed is historic and should be considered a major victory, but it would be a tragedy for the Representative’s Stupak’s language to survive into the final version of what would be President Obama?...
...There are a lot of dumb bastards in the world. Lou is one of the smart ones. There's a big difference working for someone who is smart and engaged." - CNN correspondent Bill Tucker, on Dobbs (New Yorker...