Playing Politics
- Wade
To get the record straight, I do think Jesse Ventura was a bad governor. He was too thin-skinned, favored legislation that was in his own best interest instead of the state's, and things like "I shouldn't have did it" waaay too many times for this psychotic grammarian.
But... there is a reason Jesse got elected, and it's because he spoke (initially) for young voters like me-- he wasn't the typical politician. And disgruntled voters liked Jesse because he didn't play politics as usual; he said what he felt, no matter how dumb that sounded. And he was refreshing, at least for a while.
How did people get so jaded about politics? Pretty simple, really-- politicians. Over the weekend the House of Representatives approved a radical modification to the current Medicare program. Among other items, the bill calls for increasing Medicare funding for rural health-care providers and providing a prescription drug benefit for Medicare benificiaries. Unless you're a total anti-New Dealist, that sounds fine. It also calls for providing subsidies to insurance companies to encourage them into providing private coverage to seniors, and also lays the groundwork for a Medicare privitization "pilot" to begin in 2010. These last two items have most Democrats, especially Ted Kennedy, nervous.
The bill was headed for defeat at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning when it was set for roll call vote in the House. House rules dictate that the time limit for a roll call vote is fifteen minutes. However, this vote took three hours. Why? Because the Republicans have the majority in the house, and needed to resort to strongarming, smearing, and outright lying to get their legislation passed. To wit: HHS secretary Tommy Thompson broke historical prcedent by appearing on the House floor to "motivate" representatives to change their vote to yes. Speaker Dennis Hastert called the President at 5 a.m. ("tireditery") and asked him to make courtesy calls to Republicans who opposed the bill. And, if that's not enough, a group of Republican reps started going to conservative voters against the bill and began rumors of the Democrats wanting to re-write the entire Medicare bill if this one didn't pass.
To quote a senior GOP aide, "We didn't know what they [the Democrats] were going to do, but this was a logical step for them."
In other words: break rules, intimidate, and out-and-out lie to get your bill passed. Especially in an election year.
I'm not necessarily picking on Republicans here, as much as I'd like to. Because I'm sure Democrats would have done the same thing. It's just another example of how things really get done when dealing with career politicians. Aaaah, Washington.
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