Investors Business Daily
written by IBD Editorial
Wednesday February 24, 2010 at 07:06pm
Democracy: Republicans are being warned they must help pass the Democrats' health reform or face the "nuclear option" preventing filibusters. But when in the minority, Democrats called such threats undemocratic.
As a powerful senior Democratic senator in 2005, Vice President Joseph Biden condemned bending Senate rules to prevent the minority from filibustering President Bush's judicial nominations.
"I say to my friends on the Republican side: You may own the field right now," Biden said on the Senate floor in the gravest of tones. "But you won't own it forever, and I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don't make the kind of naked power grab you are doing."
The vice president's prayers have apparently gone unheard. The White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are mulling their chances of ramming through a big-government health reform through abuse of the budget reconciliation process.
Thanks to the election last month of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., Democrats lost their 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the upper house. But using reconciliation would require only a simple majority in the Senate.
The Biden comment is just one of a series of samples of televised statements of leading Democrats, mostly from Senate floor speeches, gathered together by Naked Emperor News and featured on the Breitbart.tv Web site.
Nothing so far in the yearlong debate on health reform has exposed the Democrats' rank hypocrisy as much as the viewing of these past statements condemning as an unconstitutional power grab what they now propose to do.
Reid this week jeered that Republicans should "stop crying about reconciliation." But during the Bush administration, today's most prominent Democrats were singing an entirely different tune:
• "This is the way democracy ends," now-Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., warned his colleagues on May 19, 2005, "not with a bomb, but with a gavel."
In sharp variance to that, the Associated Press reported last year that if a bipartisan deal on health reform "falls apart, Democrats will have to turn to the 'nuclear option' — forcing through an inferior bill through a process that only requires 51 votes instead of 60, Baucus said."
• Then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on April 25, 2005, said that bypassing the filibuster through the nuclear option "really I think would change the character of the Senate forever." Back then, Obama claimed "you would essentially have still two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply majoritarian, absolute power on either side, and that's just not what the Founders intended."
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