The Patriot Post® · The Louisiana Purchase
Senate Democrats succeeded Saturday night in reaching 60 votes in favor of beginning debate on the Upper Chamber’s version of the health care takeover. However, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) didn’t reach 60 votes without some serious schmoozing, cajoling and even bribing.
Indeed, the biggest outrage in this particular vote was what it took to buy, er, persuade Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) to hop on the bandwagon – at least for now. Landrieu boasted on the Senate floor that she had succeeded in bagging $100 million for Medicaid benefits in her state. She was mistaken, though, and soon corrected the record: “I will correct something. It’s not $100 million, it’s $300 million, and I’m proud of it and will keep fighting for it.”
Come again? It took a $300 million bribe to get this “moderate” Democrat’s vote?
Political analyst Rich Galen quipped, “No reports, yet, on how angry White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was when he found out she had been satisfied with the $100 million and he overpaid by a factor of three.”
The money was unmistakably a bribe – at least in non-Beltway speak. ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reported on the specific language:
On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.”
The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.”
I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.
In other words, the bill spends two pages describing would could be written with a single world: Louisiana. (This may also help explain why the bill is long.)
Other bribes include cash for California, AARP, the abortion lobby and Big Labor. Democrats like to call such tactics “ethical” and “transparent.”
With money being given out like candy to supposed moderate senators whose support might be wavering, we can look for possible payouts to Ben Nelson (D-NE), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT). Don’t count out Maine’s twin RINOs, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, either.
Nelson, who is warning that he will vote “No” on the bill as it stands, laid out his bluff, saying, “I don’t want a big-government, Washington-run operation that would undermine the … private insurance that 200 million Americans now have.” If that were true, he’d be a conservative. Lieberman, who the media love to trot out as a “moderate” Democrat (ACU lifetime rating: 15.9), said, “I don’t want to fix the problems in our health care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis.” If both stick to their guns and keep Reid from reaching 60 votes on the final bill, we’ll be glad, but we’re also not holding our breath.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) is threatening to give “maybe a long lunch break over Christmas” if the bill is not passed before then as Democrats want to shift focus from destroying one-sixth of the economy to crushing the whole thing next year.