Cultural Gadfly

Via HotAir and Michelle Malkin, Coburn is doing something few Senators do:

Keeping a promise:

Sen. Tom Coburn has just demanded that the Senate clerk read the single-payer amendment offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders — and it’s 767 pages.

Typically, Senators offering amendments will ask for unanimous consent to avoid reading the entire measure, but all it takes is one Senator to object to demand its reading, and Coburn objected to Sanders attempt to dispense with the reading of the amendment.

To give you a sense of how this could delay things, it took the Senate clerk 18 minutes to get through the first 6 pages of the amendment, which were the table of contents… The body of the bill seems to be going faster than the table of contents, but it still looks likely to take at least 12 hours at this pace.

This is delicious. The amendment itself would have turned Medicare into socialized universal health care. Ed Morrissey notes that “no one expected this to go anywhere” anyway:

most people shrugged at its introduction as simply a sop, especially since the public option and Medicare buy-in couldn’t get 60 votes, let alone an explicit single-payer system.

But Coburn (and now Jim DeMint) have taken this opportunity “to alert taxpayers to this latest Washington scheme to take away [their] health care decisions.”

This reminds me of the episode of King of the Hill in which, to reverse a low-flow-toilet-only policy, Hank reads two years of Peggy’s musings to filibuster the vote until committee members have used (to no avail!) the low-flows.

Except the material on the Senate floor is much more fitting, in a Hamlet-esque hoisted-on-their-own-petard way.

UPDATE:

Via Drudge, Politico has the scoop:

No Health Care Bill in 2009!

Or, that’s what Pelosi says. Sort of. We shouldn’t celebrate just yet, but there’s certainly cause for a lot of optimism.

In the case of health care reform, Pelosi credited House Democrats with having saved Obama’s initiative after the onslaught of attacks during the August recess. And if the Senate can complete its bill this month, she will work to try to send a House-Senate compromise to the White House before the State of the Union.

Gotta love how constituents voicing anger and concern over Lady Pelosi’s totalitarian regime is an ‘onslaught of attacks’ to them.

Let me guess: Dem Senators were only doing their duty and vetting Clarence Thomas properly in his confirmation hearings.

Riiiiiiight…

Categories: Congress, Health Care, Politics \\ Tags: Coburn, Coburn Omnibus, DeMint, Ed Morrissey, Filibuster, Health Care, King of the Hill, Medicare, Michelle Malkin, Senate