How proud of themselves Senate Democrats must be. As Ed Morrissey notes at Hot Air, now that they’ve besotted themselves in a historically unseemly exhibition, bribing their way through a Christmas eve green-light for a monstrous 2000-page bill no one has had a real opportunity to digest, we learn President Obama has said, “Never mind.”
Though the point of mad-dash cash-for-cloture was to give the president his monumental “achievement” in time to brag about it in the State of the Union address, the administration realizes it won’t happen — too much opposition in the House, too problematic on abortion, too much outrage in the country. So health care will be tabled until February, giving us all at least a month-and-a-half to find more of its buried treasures, ear-marks, mandates and power-grabs. And it is still no sure thing, shaping up as a brawl between the two chambers. Meantime, Obama will make the “hard pivot” to jobs and the economy, underscoring the shambles he’s made of both . . . while (as Byron reports in the Washington Examiner) Senate Republicans force Democrats to vote to raise the debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion just days before Obama’s big SOTU speech touts the need for . . . fiscal responsibility.
Speaking of which, Ed adds, “Deficits are even more wild [than unemployment], as Obama’s OMB Director Peter Orszag was forced to acknowledge when he admitted that he had underestimated deficits over the next ten years by 22 percent, or $2,200,000,000,000.” Over the coming weeks, as we consider handing control of our health care to the government, it might be worth asking what Democrats would say if the insurance industry had made a $2.2 trillion error — or even a $2.2 billion error — in its ten-year forecast.