Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Just one more reason why Pelosi is unfit to be Speaker of the House …..

Rational people with even modest amounts of common sense would agree that it’s sensible and prudent to read a contract before signing it … and at the other end of the spectrum in the alternate universe of Nancy Pelosi we have the now famous remark from the infamously insensible Speaker of the House, “we have to pass a bill so that you can find out what’s in it”.

Well, lah de lah … here’s one of those little gems in the 2500 page health care reform act Speaker Pelosi was referring to.

Democrats in Congress, in their collective zealous stupidity following Pelosi’s lemming march, passed the bill in the face of strong Republican opposition. Democrats provided within the bowels of the measure, language requiring 40 million businesses beginning in 2012 to file an IRS tax form for each vendor with whom they purchase goods of $600 or more per transaction.

Now Democrats don’t want to lay claim to the provision, nor explain what the business regulation is doing in a Health Care Reform bill in the first place, other than it’s supposed to raise $19 billion in new tax revenues.

The IRS says the provision will “bury” the IRS under an avalanche of new paperwork at a cost undoing substantial amounts of the “presumed” new tax revenues. Businesses certainly don’t want it and have begun to express outrage over the provision and the compliance costs they will have to shoulder. Republicans never wanted the legislation in the first place. Democrats are falling all over themselves to distance themselves from the measure.


With Speaker Pelosi’s blessing, House Democrats before their summer recess, late last week, introduced a procedural move requiring a 2/3rds majority to repeal the language – it failed. An earlier effort for an amendment by Republicans also collapsed.

So if everyone wants this nasty little piece of stealth legislation to disappear and just go away what’s the hold up?

Precisely the partisan politics Speaker Pelosi has nurtured and amplified since taking her office.

The GOP would like to repeal all of “Obamacare” out of existence but lack the votes, and alternatively have proposed “finding” the $19 billion in cost cutting from existing programs elsewhere, which naturally the Democrats oppose.

Democrats proposed filling in the $19 billion hole with new taxes on multinational corporations and shutting down gift tax trust exemptions. Republicans oppose these ideas and, indeed, Democrats can’t find enough support among themselves to pass it without Republican help.

And with the mid-term elections looming Republicans are in no hurry to pull Obama out of an embarrassing political jam when his signature accomplishment of Health Care Reform is also drawing fire from all quarters. In large measure we can chalk Republican reluctance up to the hostile partisan environment Pelosi has fostered at every turn.

Nancy Pelosi, Good for the liberal wingnuts among her supporters … but a disaster for America!

No comments: