Long a popular occasion for self congratulation on our side. 4:47 video

Hat tip to Bruce Kesler.

Howard Fineman, at Newsweek, notes that polls confirm democrats will pay a terrible price for their leaderships hubris in enacting a major radical measure in defiance of public sentiment.

A Democratic senator I can’t name, who reluctantly voted for the health-care bill out of loyalty to his party and his admiration for Barack Obama, privately complained to me that the measure was political folly, in part because of the way it goes into effect: some taxes first, most benefits later, and rate hikes by insurance companies in between.

Besides that, this Democrat said, people who already have coverage will feel threatened and resentful about helping to cover the uninsured—an emotion they will sanitize for the polltakers into a concern about federal spending and debt.

On the day the president signed into law the “fix-it” addendum to the massive health-care measure, two new polls show just how fearful and skeptical Americans are about the entire enterprise. If the numbers stay where they are—and it’s not clear why they will change much between now and November—then the Democrats really are in danger of colossal losses at the polls.

As democrats complain loudly that Congressmen who voted for Obamacare are being threatened and harassed by outraged voters, John Hinderaker asks aloud, “What Was That Line About the Tree of Liberty and the Blood of Tyrants?”

The peril of the socialist legislators is doubtless being exaggerated in order to score political points, but Power Line makes a telling point in response. If a measure abridging liberty and expanding government authority is so unpopular that legislators are receiving threats from ordinary Americans, doesn’t that suggest that those legislators are not really functioning very effectively as representatives of the people and that something has gone seriously awry in the relationship between the governing and the governed?

A particularly nice detail of the Health Care Bill is noted by Ben Domenech:

One such surprise is found on page 158 of the legislation, which appears to create a carveout for senior staff members in the leadership offices and on congressional committees, essentially exempting those senior Democrat staffers who wrote the bill from being forced to purchase health care plans in the same way as other Americans.

Some wag at Lucianne.com has added the Obama logo to this famous picture

The famous photograph of the October 22, 1895 wreck of the Granville to Paris Express at the Montparnasse Station is becoming a popular metaphor for the hapless efforts by the Obama Administration and the democrat Congress to ram through a health care bill opposed by a significant national majority of the American people.

Finding he was several minutes late at the Paris conclusion of his 7-hour ten-minute run, Engineer Guillaume-Marie Pellerin decided to approach the Gare Montarnasse at cruising speed in an effort to make up time. He was relying on his auxiliary air-bakes to bring the locomotive safely to a halt, but the air-brakes failed. The locomotive brakes were not sufficient, and the engine proceeded out-of-control right through the buffer stop, jumping the tracks and driving 100 feet across the concourse, passing through the station wall and onto the terrace outside before falling 30 feet down onto the street below.

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Republicans have plans to use parliamentary rules to kill it in the Senate.
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Investor’s Business Daily Poll predicts 45% of physicians will close practices and retire if the health care bill passes.
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Landmark Legal Foundation promises an immediate court challenge if health care bill is passed using the “Slaughter solution.”

Dick Armey thinks the democrats will succeed in ramming through a health care bill somehow, by hook or by crook, and he tells us that Americans are wrong about Nancy Pelosi.

Former Republican House Majority Leader and current Tea Party leader Dick Armey said today that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “inept” but that Congress would likely still pass health care reform.

“What has probably surprised me more than anything else about Speaker Pelosi is her ineptness,” Armey said at luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. “I didn’t realize anyone could rise to the position of Speaker and be that inept.”

Despite his harsh criticism of the Speaker, Armey said that he personally liked Pelosi and he defended her from people who say she’s mean.

“She’s more inept than I thought she was, but she’s not as mean as people think she is,” Armey said.

But even with Pelosi’s “inept” leadership, Armey says Democrats will most likely pass health care reform legislation that has been debated for the last year and is expected to come to a vote this week.

“They’ll probably force this through,” he said. “But you can’t discount the number of people who can be moved by a ruthless and powerful political leader or group of political leaders.”

The Freedom Works chairman also had harsh word for the rest of Congress – the “self-serving” people he suggests are equally to blame for the passage of health care legislation.

“The average member Congress – House and Senate – is first and foremost only a self-serving inconvenience-minimizer who doesn’t have a lot of principle they stand on the first place,” he said. “It doesn’t take much to move a jellied spine, so they’ll probably get their votes.”

Asked if Democrats will get a bounce in poll numbers if they pass health care reform, Armey said Democrats “will get politically bounced” from office. Armey is confident that Harry Reid will lose his Senate seat in November and that Republicans will regain a majority in both houses of Congress either this election cycle or the next.

Everybody, even Lindsey Graham, recognizes the insane futility of what House democrats are about to do.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Monday used language that compared House Democrats’ efforts to pass healthcare reform legislation to a Japanese kamikaze mission.

“Nancy Pelosi, I think, has got them all liquored up on sake and you know, they’re making a suicide run here,” Graham said on the Keven Cohen Show on WVOC radio in Columbia, S.C.

Peter Beinart describes very accurately what has happened to the democrats.

Barack Obama is a representative of the younger, more ideologically-committed, much more naive generation of left-wing democrats, typical of that party’s radical base. He’s the type of democrat who is too young to have seen George McGovern lose 49 states or see Jimmy Carter shredded by Ronald Reagan.

[A] generation of Democrats, which includes Al From, Mark Penn, Joe Lieberman, William Galston, Elaine Kamarck, Dick Morris, Ed Koch, Jane Harman, Evan Bayh, and to some extent Bill and Hillary Clinton, being a liberal is like walking past a bear. Move cautiously and reassuringly and the bear will purr contentedly. But make any sudden or threatening gestures, and you’ll be mauled because, fundamentally, the bear distrusts liberals. As Galston and Kamarck wrote in their famed 1989 essay “The Politics of Evasion”—a document that helped define the “don’t scare the bear” wing of the party—Democrats can pass liberal programs “but these programs must be shaped and defended within an inhospitable ideological climate.” To pretend that the American people are liberal at heart is to evade political reality, with devastating results.

By the late 1990s, “don’t scare the bear” Democrats pretty much dominated Washington. But in the Bush years, a new faction began to emerge. These Democrats were mostly newer to politics. They had never seen a McGovern or Mondale mauled for being too far to the left. What they had seen was the post-1994 Bill Clinton, who shied away from ambitious liberal reform. And they had seen the Iraq War, which DLC types largely supported, partly out of fear that opposing it would allow Republicans to paint Democrats as soft on defense.

By 2003, this new group of Democrats was angry as hell. The Iraq War, which party elders had mostly backed, was proving a disaster, and to make matters worse, Republicans were clobbering Democrats as weak anyway. So these Democrats began fashioning a different theory: Perhaps the problem wasn’t that Democrats looked weak because they were too liberal, perhaps the problem was that Democrats looked weak because they didn’t stand up for what they really believed. In 2005, the historian Rick Pearlstein—who became something of a hero to these folks—published a book entitled The Stock Ticker and the Super Jumbo. Republicans, he argued, were like Boeing: a company that persevered in building a super jumbo airplane even when the market was bad, and thus built a dominant brand. Democrats were like the stock ticker, constantly shifting with the public mood and thus winning momentary victories but failing to build a brand people could identify with.

To change, Perlstein argued, “Democrats need to make commitments, or a network of commitments, that do not waver from election to election.” They must stick with them “even if they don’t succeed” at any given moment because doing unpopular things because you believe in them convinces Americans that you have core beliefs, which in the long term strengthens your brand. ...

When Scott Brown won his Senate seat, he made Obama choose. On the one hand, he handed the White House an excuse to abandon comprehensive reform and return to the incremental, small-bore approach that Clinton pursued after 1994. The Brown victory, in fact, seemed to illustrate the “don’t scare the bear” theory perfectly. Obama had passed the stimulus and bailed out the banks and taken over part of the auto industry and for the American people, it was too much liberal activism too fast. Polls not only showed Americans turning against Obama’s health care bill, they showed them turning against big government more generally. Continuing to pursue comprehensive reform in this inhospitable environment, warned former Carter pollster Patrick Caddell and former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen, in language that echoed “the Politics of Evasion,” would bring political calamity. “Wishing, praying or pretending” that the American people support health care reform more than they do, they insisted, “will not change these outcomes.”

Superjumbo Democrats, by contrast, argued that the public wasn’t so much anti-reform as they were anti-the legislative process that had produced reform. But more fundamentally, they argued that the American people would respect Democrats for not backing down in the face of adversity. The party might still lose seats this fall, but over time health care reform would prove popular, and the party’s willingness to fight for it would strengthen the Democratic brand.

Why exactly Obama—advised by David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel and Valerie Jarrett—decided to double down on health care remains unclear. But it’s a good bet that President Hillary Clinton—advised by Mark Penn—would have acted differently. And in acting the way he did, Obama has turned himself into a superjumbo Democrat. For the foreseeable future, he has forfeited any chance of bridging the red-blue divide. Prominent Republicans have already announced that if Democrats try to pass health care via reconciliation, they will not work across the aisle to pass anything major this year. Conversely, Obama has cemented his bond with the netroots. It doesn’t really matter that the health care reform bill he is fighting for isn’t particularly left-wing. For the netroots, a politicians’ ideological purity has always been less important than his willingness to resist pressure from the other side, which is exactly what Obama has just done.

Whether health care reform passes or not, Obama has embraced polarization over triangulation. He has chosen Karl Rove’s politics of base mobilization over Dick Morris’s politics of crossover appeal, with consequences not merely for how he campaigns for Democrats in 2010, but for he campaigns for himself in 2012. And that’s a disaster for “don’t scare the bear” Democrats whether Obamacare passes or not. The reason is that the DLC wing of the party is much more top-down than the MoveOn wing. It has always wielded influence primarily through elected leaders rather than grassroots activists. But today, Obama is the only leader in the Democratic Party who really matters. As the retirement of Evan Bayh illustrates, there are few nationally prominent DLC-aligned politicians left. (The one person who could have rallied that faction of the party against Obama is now his secretary of state). The DLC wing’s best hope for relevance, therefore, was that Obama himself would restrain the party’s base, that his White House would nurture a new generation of centrist candidates.

That hope is now gone. From top to bottom, Democrats have decided to bet the party’s future on the belief that Americans prefer bold liberals to cautious ones. Now it’s up to the bear.

Former Congressman Eric Massa

The Politico:

Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) says the House ethics committee is investigating him for inappropriate comments he made to a male staffer on New Year’s Eve — and that he’s the victim of a power play by Democratic leaders who want him out of Congress because he’s a “no” vote on health care reform.

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill,” Massa, who on Friday announced his intention to resign, said during a long monologue on radio station WKPQ. “And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me, and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

Eric Massa does not like Rahm Emanuel very much and has a lot to say about it in this WKPQ-AM 1:40 interview on Real Clear Politics.

“Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.”
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Update, March 10:

Eric Massa’s television apearances, WaPO reports, included a number of contradictory statements.

Massa went on television Tuesday night for the first time since the allegations surfaced, but his comments in two cable television interviews contradicted earlier statements, serving only to raise more questions.

The freshman Democrat told Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck that “not only did I grope [a staffer], I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe,” then said hours later on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that “it is not true” that he groped anyone on his staff.

He told Beck that he resigned from the House because he made the mistake of “getting too familiar with my staff” members, but he told King that he left primarily for health reasons. Massa, 50, has survived non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but he said he is afraid that he is facing his “third major cancer-recurrence scare.”

On Sunday, Massa said he was set up by powerful Democrats such as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) as part of an effort to remove opponents of health-care reform legislation. He backed away from that claim Tuesday, telling Beck, “I wasn’t forced out. I forced myself out.”

Glenn Beck wound up apologizing to his views for wasting their time with Massa.

Conservative AM radio commentators were skeptical of Massa yesterday, noting that claims that he was being pushed out for not supporting health care were contradicted by his previous vigorous advocacy of a public option.

Before running for Congress as a democrat, Massa had been a registered Republican.

The way Mr. Massa has been all over the map politically and his propensity to contradict himself reminds me of Andrew Sullivan, so I find it pretty easy to believe the former Congressman is gay.

The leftist democrat base waves flowers

Political strategists on both sides are wondering aloud why it is that democrat members of Congress seem willing to climb aboard the health care flying bomb and head into a one-way legislative mission trying to sink Americans’ free choice in health care. Are they crazy? Do they believe the Emperor Obama’s promises that they will live forever in the Socialist equivalent of the Yakukuni Shrine? Quite a lot of them surely won’t be coming back to Washington next year. So why are they doing it?

Gary Andres explains the thinking of the democrat kamikaze.

One Democratic lobbyist advanced the “public education thesis.” “Sure, this might seem controversial now. But once it’s done, Members of Congress will have a chance to explain what they did, why, and how it’s going to make a difference.”

According to this theory, support will rise and opposition will ease, but only after the bill is enacted. The strategy, however, hinges on lawmakers’ ability to do an effective post-passage marketing job. It also assumes the opposition will not mount any kind of successful counter mobilization to protest its passage.

A variation on the public education thesis is the “Americans support success” conjecture. It goes something like this: Voters like accomplishments. Seeing the president in the Rose Garden, signing health care reform legislation into law will improve Mr. Obama’s approval numbers, which helps his party politically in the midterm election. Getting a bill done – almost irrespective of its contents – will help boost the White House’s and Democrats’ political fortunes, according to this view.

Next there is the “good as it gets” hypothesis. After two successful election cycles (2006 and 2008) Democrats amassed large majorities in the House and the Senate. But now they have reached their maximum majority size, based on this theory. With the prospects of their party strength only shrinking next year, now is the time to act on health care.

George Crawford, a former chief of staff to Speaker Pelosi and now a senior government affairs advisor at King and Spalding wrote an opinion piece recently in The Hill underscoring this point. Crawford argues that after “successful campaigns over the past several cycles, Democrats had come closer to their potential high-water mark.” He goes on to posit the party’s majority would get smaller irrespective of the House’s actions in the 111th Congress. So they might as well do it while Democrats have the votes.

Finally, there is the “energize the base” argument. This one has perhaps the most appeal because it includes some empirical support. Public polling on health care always masks huge variation in opinion between Republicans and Democrats.

For example, in a recent Rasmussen poll, President Obama’s health care plan lagged overall by a 41 percent (oppose)—56 percent (favor) margin among likely voters. Yet looking at the crosstabs tells a very different story. Nearly 7 out of 10 (71 percent) self-identified Democrats favor the legislation, while only 12 percent of Republicans approve. This nearly 60 point spread between the parties on this issue has emerged in poll after poll in the last several years on this issue.

In other words, passing health care reform is a bit of a Holy Grail for Democrats. It is one of the most important debates and potential accomplishments for the party’s most ardent partisans – and has been for many years. Failure to enact this legislation would render a crippling blow to those most apt to volunteer, talk to their friends about politics, give money and vote in the upcoming midterm election. These base voters may not always guarantee the party’s victory, but without them defeat is assured.

Some combination of these four theories is the driving force behind the Democrats’ end game on health care. Of course, each of these conjectures includes a host of counter arguments that could prove disastrous for congressional Democrats in November. But for now, the president and his party’s legislative leaders agree – the only thing worse than passing health care reform is doing nothing at all.

It is very odd, distinctly in the “man bites dog” category of events falling into the opposite of normal reality, to see the democrats, the party of competent political tactics and mechanics, the party contemptuous of theory, the party dedicated above everything else to winning at any price and governing, deliberately marching into political destruction, openly defying a substantial majority of public opinion, in full knowledge of the consequences.

We can only conclude, I think, that ideology really has triumphed over there. They are willing to sacrifice their Congressional majority, and many of their political careers, for Socialism.

Obviously, they believe that, once they pass their health care bill, it will become another third-rail entitlement. Americans will become dependent and addicted, and no one will ever be able to alter the new order of reality and repeal it. Curiously, they seem to have overlooked their own Rube Goldberg design (intended to bring costs under a trillion dollars) of starting revenue collection immediately, but delaying most of the system’s arrival until 2013 and after. Republicans have plenty of time to recapture Congress and then repeal all this, and Republicans are promising to do exactly that.

In the end, the democrat’s kamikaze health care push is very likely to prove just as futile as the Japanese precedent in the final stages of WWII.

Mickey Kaus

Relatively rational liberal commentator Robert Michael “Mickey” Kaus has filed his nomination papers to run against Barbara Boxer in the democrat primary in California for that party’s nomination to the US Senate.

Kaus went to Harvard and has been a prominent blogger since 1999. Although he’s a liberal, he fairly frequently posts well-reasoned analyses I agree with and link.

Investor’s Business Daily describes his politics as follows:

Kaus is a strong supporter of national health care, though he harshly criticized the White House “cost control” marketing strategy. However, he is a harsh critic of labor unions, a skeptic of affirmative action and an opponent of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Kaus is known for his honesty about the motivations of his allies, his opponents and himself.

I’m not sure that Mickey Kaus is any worse than Carly Fiorina overall, and either of the two would be a definite improvement over Barbara Boxer. I think Kaus has a chance of winning the primary, and is bound to make it an interesting race.

Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News interviews Lamar Alexander (R- TN) on the democrat attempt to use reconciliation to pass the health care bill.

The democrats seem willing to destroy themselves for socialism, and as Lamar Alexander promises, we’ll run candidates promising to repeal it.

2:49 video

VARGAS: You had said in your opening remarks at the health care summit, you quoted Senator Byrd when you said—you called on the president to renounce using reconciliation to push the bill through the Senate with a simple majority vote, saying, quote, “It would be an outrage to run the health care bill through the Senate like a freight train with this process.”

Why—why are you so opposed to this, given the fact that Republicans have used reconciliation more often than Democrats in the past?

ALEXANDER: Well, the outraged words were Senator Byrd’s words, not mine.

VARGAS: True…

ALEXANDER: You’re correct. The reconciliation procedure is a—where you use legislative (ph) procedure is a (ph)—where you use—legislative procedure 19 times it’s been used. It’s for the purpose of taxing and spending and—and reducing deficits.

But the difference here is that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate—it would really be the end of the United States Senate as a protector of minority rights, as a place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority, and it would be a political kamikaze mission for the Democratic Party if they jam this through after the American people have been saying, look, we’re trying to tell you in every way we know how, in elections, in surveys, in town hall meetings, we don’t want this bill. ....

VARGAS: When you say political kamikaze, are you saying that if the Democrats push this through, they will lose all their seats in November? I mean, what are we talking about here?

ALEXANDER: Well, here’s what I think. I mean, the people are saying, “We don’t want it,” and the Democrats are saying, “We don’t care. We’re going to pass it anyway.” And so for the next three months, Washington will be consumed with the Democrats trying to jam this through in a very messy procedure an unpopular health care bill.

And then for the rest of the year, we’re going to be involved in a campaign to repeal it. And every Democratic candidate in the country is going to be defined by this unpopular health care bill at a time when the real issues are jobs, terror and debt.

Kim Strassel, in the Wall Street Journal, explains why even the decision to employ the reconciliation “nuclear option,” throwing the rules of the Senate out the window, does not actually guarantee that democrats can pass the health care bill. The focus of drama now moves over to the House.

The Summit Show was designed by Democrats for Democrats, to give Mr. Obama an all-day stage to inspire and exhort his party to charge once more into the health fray. It’s about “altering the political atmospherics,” admitted one senior Democrat. Yet for all the talk of “jump-start,” there’s little to suggest the ugly politics of passage have changed.

The day after Mr. Brown’s victory broke the majority’s power, Democrats turned to New Strategy, Version 37, Part 12. It is now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s job to pass the Senate’s Christmas Eve bill. It is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s job to pass retroactive “fixes” to that legislation through an unsightly “reconciliation” process that requires only 51 Senate votes.

The strategy is somewhat bully for Mr. Reid, who can afford to lose eight of his own members. It’s meaningless for Mrs. Pelosi. If the speaker had the votes post-Brown to pass the Senate bill, we’d be living under ObamaCare. She didn’t have them then, and yesterday’s summit was a sideshow to the problems she has getting them now.

A few numbers: Mrs. Pelosi passed her health-care bill in early November, with three votes to spare. The one Republican yes has since bailed. On the Democratic side, one vote has left Congress, one has died, and one retires this week. A smaller Congress means Mrs. Pelosi only needs 216 votes. If all were equal to November, she’s at 216.

Only it isn’t November. It’s nearly March, and the speaker is being asked to pass a bill vastly different from her own, in the wake of a crushing electoral defeat and in light of dire public-opinion polls.

Mrs. Pelosi has at least 11 Democrats with big problems with the Senate’s flimsy language on publicly funded abortions. This is the same crew that nearly derailed her first bill, and whose threats at the time were serious enough to cause Mrs. Pelosi to throw over her liberals in favor of pro-life demands.

For many, this is a moral issue that can’t be changed with Cornhusker kickbacks or “atmospherics.” Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who spearheaded the pro-life fight, has already declared the Senate bill “unacceptable.” And the Conference of Catholic Bishops has no intention of now giving these pro-life Democrats an out.

Another reality is Mrs. Pelosi’s many announced retirements. The conventional wisdom holds that some Blue Dogs who voted no the first time—say, Tennessee’s John Tanner—might now be willing to stick it to their constituents as their last act in Congress. Maybe.

Mrs. Pelosi is surely more worried about retiring members who voted yes and are convinced that vote hastened their departure. Arkansas Rep. Marion Berry used his retirement announcement to rip the White House for pushing Blue Dogs into an electoral abyss. House Democrats leaving to run for the Senate—including Indiana’s Brad Ellsworth or New Hampshire’s Paul Hodes—might be more interested in, say, winning those races than clinging to their prior yes votes.

Speaking of Indiana, Mr. Reid’s decision to go reconciliation adds to Mrs. Pelosi’s problems. If retiring Sen. Evan Bayh votes no on reconciliation, is Mr. Ellsworth—running for Mr. Bayh’s seat—going to vote yes? Democratic senators will claim to vote against reconciliation on technical grounds, but the public will view it as the disownment of the president’s agenda. The pressure on House Democrats from states with senators who vote no will be incalculable.

Don’t forget, too, the House members who have seen their district polls disintegrate since their first yes. No doubt they appreciated the president’s spirit yesterday. Yet unless the summit drives a 30-point shift in public opinion, they retain good reason to not repeat their mistake.

The trillion-dollar question is how many votes Mrs. Pelosi had in reserve the first time. Yet here, too, March is no November. These members are now on record in opposition. They have benefited back home from those no votes. Why flip now?

Mrs. Pelosi has been effective at marshalling votes, and nobody should write her off. Yet it says plenty that she is demanding that Mr. Reid go first. Something big must change for her to move her members. Mr. Reid knows even reconciliation is no sure thing and is demanding that Mrs. Pelosi be the one to go first.

The next few days will provide a better sense as to whether the sight of 40 Washington pols summiting over CBO estimates is a game changer. Don’t count on it. Talk is easy. Politics is hard.

With the media and the country distracted yesterday by President Obama’s health care summit, House democrats tried to slip provisions into the intelligence authorization bill that would not only have criminalized a number of controversial interrogation tactics, an “includes but is not limited to” provision would have made anything done by a US interrogator allegedly “degrading” to a prisoner potentially punishable by imprisonment.

Faced with strong Republican opposition and fearing the reaction of the public, the House leadership backed off and removed the entire bill from consideration.

The Hill:

[Intelligence committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) added language, originally offered by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.)] into the intelligence authorization bill that would establish criminal punishment for CIA agents and other intelligence officials who engage in “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” during interrogations.

Democrats inserted an 11-page addition into the bill late Wednesday night as the House Rules Committee considered the legislation.

The provision, previously not vetted in committee, applied to “any officer or employee of the intelligence community” who during interrogations engages in beatings, infliction of pain or forced sexual acts. The bill said the acts covered by the provision would include inducing hypothermia, conducting mock executions or “depriving the [detainee] of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care.”

The language gave Congress the discretion to determine what the terms mean, and it would have imposed punishments of up to 15 years in prison, and in some cases, life sentences if a detainee died as a result of the interrogation.

Andrew McCarthy explains just how far the language went:

The provision is impossibly vague — who knows what “degrading” means? Proponents will say that they have itemized conduct that would trigger the statute (I’ll get to that in a second), but it is not true. The proposal says the conduct reached by the statute “includes but is not limited to” the itemized conduct. (My italics.) That means any interrogation tactic that a prosecutor subjectively believes is “degrading” (e.g., subjecting a Muslim detainee to interrogation by a female CIA officer) could be the basis for indicting a CIA interrogator. ...

Waterboarding is not all. The Democrats’ bill would prohibit — with a penalty of 15 years’ imprisonment — the following tactics, among others:

– “Exploiting the phobias of the individual”
– Stress positions and the threatened use of force to maintain stress positions – “Depriving the individual of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care” – Forced nudity – Using military working dogs (i.e., any use of them — not having them attack or menace the individual; just the mere presence of the dog if it might unnerve the detainee and, of course, “exploit his phobias”) – Coercing the individual to blaspheme or violate his religious beliefs (I wonder if Democrats understand the breadth of seemingly innocuous matters that jihadists take to be violations of their religious beliefs) – Exposure to “excessive” cold, heat or “cramped confinement” (excessive and cramped are not defined) – “Prolonged isolation” – “Placing hoods or sacks over the head of the individual”

Naturally, all of these tactics are interspersed with such acts as forcing the performance of sexual acts, beatings, electric shock, burns, inducing hypothermia or heat injury — as if all these acts were functionally equivalent. ...

Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his “phobias exploited.”

Megan McArdle warns that trying an end run around the Senate’s rules will prove a costly mistake for democrats.

If the Democrats use budget reconciliation to bypass the Republicans, they will be making a big mistake.

Reconciliation is not meant to handle these sorts of problems; it’s meant to help Congress get revenues in line with outlays without letting protracted negotiations push us into a budget crisis. It’s not possible to do any sort of comprehensive, rational overhaul of the Senate health bill — which after all, was intended to be the opening salvo in a negotiation, not the final bill.

More broadly, for all that Democrats are declaring that they have a mandate, it’s pretty clear that the public does not want them to pass any of the health care bills on the table — which has to include the Obama plan, since it is only a minor tweak on the existing proposals. Polls have shown more Americans opposing passage than supporting it since early summer, and opposition has risen fairly steadily over time.

Democrats have had plenty of time to make their case. They have failed to do so. The longer they have talked, the more firmly the voters have rejected their ideas. If Congress goes ahead anyway, they will pay a terrible political price.

Many progressives are pushing the notion that having already once voted for it, Democrats will pay that political price no matter what, so they might as well pass it. That ignores several factors. First, a hated bill that failed last December is not going to engender the same ire as a hated bill that passed in May.