When’s the last time we heard the name of House Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter around the Corner anyhow? Oh, that’s right, it was when she was calling for the House to kill the Senate bill at CNN.

Here’s what Slaughter said in an op-ed:

The Senate health care bill is not worthy of the historic vote that the House took a month ago.
[U]nder the Senate plan, millions of Americans will be forced into private insurance company plans, which will be subsidized by taxpayers. That alternative will do almost nothing to reform health care but will be a windfall for insurance companies. Is it any surprise that stock prices for some of those insurers are up recently?. . .
Supporters of the weak Senate bill say “just pass it — any bill is better than no bill.”
I strongly disagree — a conference report is unlikely to sufficiently bridge the gap between these two very different bills.
It’s time that we draw the line on this weak bill and ask the Senate to go back to the drawing board. The American people deserve at least that.

At the time Slaughter came out against the bill, I noted that she

isn’t just some rank-and-file progressive barking about the public option, she’s the chair of the House Rules Committee, and co-chair of the “Pro-Choice” caucus, meaning she will have plenty to say about whether Stupak survives a conference report. Her going on record so firmly against the bill could signal that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have as firm a hold on her caucus as she’d like us to believe.

Needless to say, the reconciliation “fixes” do nothing to address the public option, or the subsidies to the insurance companies, or the individual mandate. And there is no amount of bolding or italicizing that can do justice to Representative Slaughter’s call for the Senate to “go back to the drawing board” because “the American people deserve at least that.”

Oh well. I guess if you can’t beat ’em, deem ’em.