First Tuesdays Strategies

by J. Warren Tompkins

Welcome to the U.S. Senate, where we’re playing, “Let’s Make a Deal.” Your host is the Democratic Party, and those guys will do just about anything for you to get their colossal health care boondoggle passed. Anything, that is, if you’re a senator.

The antics by Senate liberals got so out of hand that there are now calls for investigations into their behavior. Events went down that have been dubbed the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Nebraska Compromise.” Sens. Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson were two Democrats sitting on the fence regarding the bill. If they wanted to stay true to their self-professed moderate status, they would have voted against the legislation. The wily Democratic leadership had other ideas.

It’s on page 432 in the bill, but Landrieu got hers – a line-item that only applied to one state, Louisiana. An expansion of Medicaid for the people of one state, to buy off one senator. The price: $100 million. Yes, it’s shocking – Majority Leader Harry Reid is not above using $100 million taxpayer dollars for a political ploy. This is the sort of governance you get with liberals in power.

Let’s not forget about Nelson, whose capitulation on the legislation led to it getting passed by the super-majority needed to avoid a filibuster. Since May, the Nebraska Democrat said that he would oppose the bill. Then, he was a supporter of the conservative opinion of this big-government plan. Enter Reid, stage left.

There was no need to reinvent the wheel. In addition to getting cursory language about abortion funding, Nebraska was exempted from paying for any further Medicaid expansion in the state. Under the usual rules, the state and the Federal government share the cost. Now, your tax dollars go to pay all of Nebraska’s Medicaid costs.

Two senators, bought off, with your money.

South Carolina isn’t left out of the liberal malfeasance, either. Rep. Jim Clyburn has made no bones about his free-spending ways and his pork-laden projects. In regard to justifiable outrage from conservatives about the deals handed out in the Senate, the Sixth District congressman said that Republicans should be looking to see what they could get out of the bill. Translated, he was saying that conservatives should try to find inventive ways to spend your money on pork. Sorry, Congressman, one party already cornered the market on that game.

Clyburn tried to make a deal. He attempted to slide in $100,000 for a one-room library in Jamestown, S.C. into a $1.1 trillion appropriations bill. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Mint. The money was sent to Jamestown, Calif. Even when liberals try to waste your money, they can’t do it right.

by J. Warren Tompkins

In the financial community, today is called the Quadruple Witching Day on Wall Street. For me, today is Quadruple Witching Day in politics. I never thought I’d agree with Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann, the AFL-CIO and Sen. John McCain all in one day.

For those who don’t have knowledge of the unusual parlance of investors, “quadruple witching” is when contracts for stock index futures, stock index options and single stock futures all expire. This time, Dean, Olbermann, the union organization and the Arizona senator’s support of the liberals’ health care legislation expired, and I’m glad about that.

It cannot be said enough what a job-killing bomb this bill would be on our economy in general, and our small businesses in particular. The penalties on companies are wide-ranging: fines – per worker – for not providing insurance, paying half of the $54 billion Medicare tax increase, more than $100 billion in taxes and fees on the health industry itself. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. And fortunately, liberals are now eating their own and killing the chances of the bill to pass.

Dean, the demagogic former presidential candidate, opened his Washington Post column with, “If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill.” Neither would I. Olbermann, on his MSNBC show, said, “This is not health. This is not care. This is certainly not reform.” Indeed.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka stated, “The House bill is the model for genuine health care reform. Working people cannot accept anything less than real reform.” There lies the rub. Liberals want the bill to go further, to be even worse than what the Senate is now considering. Thanks to this faction of the far-left, conservatives find ourselves in the enviable position of watching Democrats fight each other until the bill finally flatlines.

McCain was pleasantly surprised by this development as well, saying in an AP story, “If you live long enough, all things can happen. I now find myself in complete agreement with Dr. Howard Dean, who says that we should stop this bill in its tracks. … Dr. Dean, I am with you.”

The liberal in-fighting over this turkey of an attempt at health care reform is a real Christmas gift to American business, American workers and conservatives’ chances to throw the Democrats out next year.

As my long time good friend Governor Haley Barbour recently said in Politico, “This is such bad policy for the United States, and it’s going to be so bad for our health care system. It’s going to make health insurance premiums go up. It’s going to cut Medicare by about $500 billion. Huge state tax increases. It is catastrophic for small business. But if the Democrats wanna do something to help Republicans, I can’t improve on this.”