Last month, a poll showed 3 out of 5 Ohioans disapproved of the President’s health care plan. Only 20% felt lack of universal coverage was the biggest problem. Only 1/3 favored a single-payer system. And half hoped states would have the opportunity to opt out.
In response, Mary Jo Kilroy put her hands over her ears and started screaming, “LA LA LA LA LAAAAA!”
Even as President Barack Obama talks of a health-care summit with Republicans, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy says Senate Democrats should use their majority to muscle through health-care reforms if they can’t get the GOP to go along.
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The idea, dubbed “reconciliation,” has attracted support since the election on Jan. 19 of Republican Scott Brown to an open Senate seat from Massachusetts. Brown’s election deprived Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority. Since then, Democrats have been casting for ways to salvage aspects of the health-care legislation from a political quagmire.
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“To make broad-ranging, radical change in a system as important as health care on a narrow, partisan and fleeting political advantage is a prescription for ongoing national conflict,” former state Sen. Steve Stivers, Kilroy’s likely GOP opponent, said in a statement.
“Were Mrs. Kilroy and her colleagues in Congress willing to work in bipartisan fashion, we would already have health-care reform passed, and we would have a working relationship focused on the urgent priority of our citizens: job creation.”
Senator Judd Gregg, the man President Obama thought highly enough of to nominate for Secretary of Commerce, explained the purpose of reconciliation in a way even Mary Jo Kilroy should be able to understand:
Reconciliation is not the right path to achieve this goal. The process first emerged to give Congress a tool to help bring spending and revenues in line with the fiscal policy assumed in the budget resolution. In short, the intended purpose of reconciliation is to make sure there is a way to enact, via a simple majority vote, changes to fiscal policy levers that will implement the budget totals, not to force through, using an expedited process, drastic and expensive new policies that will affect every American household.
Kilroy putting herself out there as someone so absolutely unwilling to compromise that she would prefer to manipulate the lawmaking process says a lot about her character. That kind of partisanship will not go over well in her heavily Independent district.