In 15 consecutive Rasmussen Reports polls conducted over the past four months, the percentage of Americans that oppose the plan has stayed between 52% and 58%. The number in favor has held steady between 38% and 44%.
The dynamics of the numbers have remained constant as well. Democratic voters strongly support the plan while Republicans and unaffiliated voters oppose it. Senior citizens—the people who use the health-care system more than anybody else and who vote more than anybody else in midterm elections—are more opposed to the plan than younger voters. For every person who strongly favors it, two are strongly opposed.
Why can’t the president move the numbers? One reason may be that he keeps talking about details of the proposal while voters are looking at the issue in a broader context. Polling conducted earlier this week shows that 57% of voters believe that passage of the legislation would hurt the economy, while only 25% believe it would help. That makes sense in a nation where most voters believe that increases in government spending are bad for the economy.
When the president responds that the plan is deficit neutral, he runs into a pair of basic problems. The first is that voters think reducing spending is more important than reducing the deficit. So a plan that is deficit neutral with a big spending hike is not going to be well received.
But the bigger problem is that people simply don’t trust the official projections. People in Washington may live and die by the pronouncements of the Congressional Budget Office, but 81% of voters say it’s likely the plan will end up costing more than projected. Only 10% say the official numbers are likely to be on target.
As a result, 66% of voters believe passage of the president’s plan will lead to higher deficits and 78% say it’s at least somewhat likely to mean higher middle-class taxes. Even within the president’s own political party there are concerns on these fronts.
President Obama’s attempts to ram health- care reform through an increasingly reluctant Congress are starting to resemble a really eventful episode of “The Sopranos.”
Whether or not you believe former Rep. Eric Massa’s bizarre accusations of locker-room confrontations and conspiracies to drive him from office, there is no doubt that the Obama administration and its congressional allies are willing to use every trick in the book to get this bill passed.
They’ve already bought votes with pork and special deals — the “Louisiana purchase” ($300 million to bolster that state’s Medicaid program, which swayed Sen. Mary Landrieu); the “Cornhusker kickback” ($100 million to Medicaid there, sweetening the pot for Sen. Ben Nelson), and Florida’s “Gator Aid” (a Medicare deal potentially worth $5 billion, a hefty price for Sen. Bill Nelson’s vote). Plus the millions for Connecticut hospitals, Montana asbestos abatement and so on.
Nor were the Obamans willing to let a little thing like election laws stand in the way. They rewrote Massachusetts law to allow for an appointed senator to hold office for several months, hoping to get the bill through before the special election that Scott Brown ultimately won. Their plans spoiled, they even considered holding up Brown’s seating to let the appointed senator continue to vote on health care — until public outrage forced them to back down.
And, of course, there has been an unprecedented willingness to ignore congressional rules — from the failure to appoint a “conference committee” to negotiate differences between the House and Senate bills, to their current plans to use the reconciliation process to bypass a Republican filibuster.
The health care reform bill passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve appears to be dead on arrival in the House, as seven anti-abortion Democrats intend to join the ranks of lawmakers who plan to vote against the legislation, Fox News has confirmed.
Seven new no votes would be enough to kill the Senate bill, and several more fence-sitting lawmakers are under pressure from both sides of the aisle.
Foremost among the seven new no votes is Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., whose anti-abortion amendment to the House version of the legislation got the bill passed in that chamber last year.
But because the Senate and House Democratic leaders weren’t able to agree on joint legislation before losing their supermajority in the Senate this year, they have few options other than getting the House to pass the Senate bill and then making changes to the law through a separate budget reconciliation bill that could pass with simple majorities.
The Senate bill, however, doesn’t contain the same language as the Stupak amendment, which explicitly prohibits federal funding of abortion in any of the reform measures intended to expand health care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.
Glenn Beck will have an interview with Congressman Massa on his television show tomorrow.
“Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) said. “He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.”
Rep. Massa describes a confrontation with Emanuel in a shower: “I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me.”
Rep. Eric Massa, D-N.Y., under investigation for alleged sexual harassment of a male staffer, accused House Democratic leaders of lying about the charges against him and using them to run him out of Congress because he voted against health care reform when it last came before the House.
Roll Call reports this morning that on the local radio show he hosts in his district, Massa said he had not been informed of the sexual harassment allegations before they became public. He claimed that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., spoke falsely when he said he had brought the matter to him previously, Massa said. “Steny Hoyer has never said a single word to me, at all, ever, not once,” Massa said. “Not a word. This is a lie. It’s a blatant, false statement.”
He also railed against Hoyer for discussing Ethics Committee business with the press. “Never before in the history of the House of Representatives has a sitting leader of the Democratic Party discussed allegations of House investigations publicly before findings of fact. Ever.”
Massa, who voted against health care reform in November, accused Democratic leaders of driving him out of office in the cause of passing health care reform. “With the departure of Congressman Neil Abercrombie (D), who is running for the governorship of Hawaii, and with the tragic and very sad passing of my personal friend Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”
The comment that landed Massa in hot water, he claimed, was a sexual proposition he made in jest at a table full of drunken male staffers at a wedding reception on New Year’s Eve. He also said that the complainant was not the man he allegedly harassed, but an offended third party who witnessed the incident.
“This is what Congress has come to,” an angry Massa said. “The government is not our enemy, but it is broken beyond repair.”
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Massa-accuses-Dem-leaders-of-railroading-him-because-he-voted-against-ObamaCare-86840467.html#ixzz0hdoGmebt
U.S. nonfarm payrolls declined for the 25th time in the past 26 months, falling by 36,000 in February to a seasonally adjusted 129.5 million, the Labor Department estimated Friday.
The nation’s jobless rate was steady at 9.7% as the number of people employed rose by 308,000, according to the household survey.
Oil prices rose to near $81 a barrel Friday in Asia as crude traders followed equity markets higher ahead of a key U.S. jobs report.
Benchmark crude for April delivery was up 48 cents to $80.69 a barrel at late afternoon Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 66 cents to settle at $80.21 on Thursday.
A new congressional report released Friday says the United States’ long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama’s grim budget submission last month.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama’s budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That’s $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.
Federal employees are earning considerably more than people doing similar work in the private sector, according to an analysis from USA Today — news that’s sure to rile lawmakers already concerned about the rate of federal spending.
In more than eight out of 10 occupations, federal employees earned higher salaries, the newspaper’s analysis of federal data found.
Among the higher earners are federal accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors.
Federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for jobs that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. By comparison, the average pay for the same batch of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
The figures don’t include health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee and $9,882 per private employee in 2008, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The federal government spends about $125 billion each year on compensation for about 2 million civilian employees.
President Barack Obama opened the final act of a year-long drama over health-care legislation Wednesday, calling on Democrats in Congress to approve the sweeping bill despite political risks and Republican opposition.
The president vowed to rally Americans and wavering lawmakers alike. White House aides said a pair of trips next week will be followed by a stream of public and private lobbying. The White House wants final votes by month’s end.
“At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of white-coated doctors and nurses in the East Room, where a year ago he started the drive for the legislation.
With polls showing that the legislation is unpopular and congressional Democrats bracing for big losses in this fall’s elections, the president urged them to ignore the politics. “I do not know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right,” he said. “Let’s get it done.”
Democrats and the White House are balancing high risks and rewards. The health overhaul represents the biggest social-policy change since the Great Society of the mid-1960s created Medicare. But if the public judges the overhaul harshly, it is likely to cost some Democrats their seats, and the party’s majority in the House could be at risk.
President Obama declared for the first time yesterday that he was prepared to steamroller his troubled health reform legislation through Congress with only Democratic support; a move Republicans denounced as the “nuclear option”.
Signalling that his patience had snapped after a year-long fight, Mr Obama laid the ground for Democrats in Congress to muscle the Bill through using a high-risk legislative manoeuvre known as reconciliation, which overrides a Republican filibuster. Although he did not use the word “reconciliation”, Mr Obama made it clear that that was the route he intended to take.
Obama names brother of undecided House Dem to Appeals Court.
Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he’s obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson’s brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
“Scott Matheson is a distinguished candidate for the Tenth Circuit court,” President Obama said. “Both his legal and academic credentials are impressive and his commitment to judicial integrity is unwavering. I am honored to nominate this lifelong Utahn to the federal bench.”
So, Scott Matheson appears to have the credentials to be a judge, but was his nomination used to buy off his brother’s vote?
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