Some centrist House Democrats have reached out to Republicans to explore breaking with their party leadership on healthcare and crafting a reform bill with the rival GOP, one congressman claimed Saturday.
Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) asserted that an “interesting development” is taking place underway that, if true, could effectively remove Democratic leadership from the driver’s seat on healthcare reform legislation in the House.
“There’s an interesting development occurring behind the scenes, wherein moderate Democrats — so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats — and business-friendly new Democrats are actually starting to have conversations with us to build a coalition from the center outward, to actually really come up with substantive and well-founded healthcare reform,” Boustany said during an appearance on Fox News. “And that’s the only way to do this.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders have moved quickly to pass a preliminary version of healthcare legislation before the August recess in Congress.
And that is part of the reason Obama, Pelosi and Reid want it done so fast – to prevent just such opposition from gaining cohesion and popular traction.
Remember, the Democrat House majority is gained by the Democrats getting centrist and conservative Democrats to win in GOP and GOP-leaning districts in 2006 and 2008 (their Senate majority is less dependent upon this, but at least 7 of the 60 Democrats are such). Such a tactic is great for getting you the committee chairmanships and getting the left all atwitter about an alleged leftward surge of the electorate, but it has the drawback of filling up your caucus with people who daren’t go along with the party leadership on most issues. Right now, these center and conservative Democrats are facing a 2010 mid-term with no anti-GOP wave at their backs and the headwinds of an increasingly toxic Democrat brand-name coupled with increasingly unpopular Obama Administration policies.
Truth be told, most of these center and conservative Democrats would have run as GOPers had there (a) been an open GOP seat to run in and (b) if the GOP brand hadn’t been so badly knocked down by the GOP Congressional spending binge. This, by the way, argues very strongly for term limits – it just does so many wonderful things: prevents the creation of “Congressman-for-Life” members; allows there to be frequent “change” without the necessity of changing the party registration of the office-holder; periodically provides a whole, new crop of Congresscritters the lobbyists haven’t figured out how to bribe, etc, etc, etc., but I digress. These center and right Democrats can fall on their swords, back Obamacare, etc and then lose very badly in 2010 – or, they can buck their party and have at least a 50/50 shot at making it through. I think they’ll buck, and buck rather hard.
What this means for the GOP is that we have the materials right in front of us to rebuild a center/right majority in the House – to effectively shut down the Obama/Pelosi/Reid socialist steam roller. We should take this opportunity, and add to it the opportunity to put up libertarian candidates of a fiscal conservative/judicial restraint variety in moderate Democrat districts, and pick off a couple score of their seats, just as they did with a lot of ours. The future looks bright – provided we can just slow down Obamunism until 2010…even at the start of the year, it will be too late, because even Democrats in relatively safe seats won’t want to go to the mat for socialism at that point.
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