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RUSH: If you were not here yesterday I want to review what the tactic is in the Senate to get a health care bill on Obama’s desk in the next couple of weeks. And the source for this is the Heritage Foundation, and I’ve doubled checked it with a couple other people. It is exactly right. Here’s how the process will work. Harry Reid is going to put… There’s a bunch of different bills that he could attach one of the Senate health care bills to as an amendment. It was originally suspected that what Harry Reid would do would be to take a bill that the House passed long ago that’s been languishing in the Senate, a bill that taxes the bones of employees who receive TARP funds. The Senate has not acted on that. And, remember, in the Senate everything has to get 60 votes other than budget bills. Sixty votes before final debate and final vote can take place. It’s called cloture.

And there’s no way that Reid can get 60 votes on a straight, down-the-line health care reform bill. It just isn’t there. So the trick is to take a health care bill in the Senate and attach it as an amendment to another bill that could be related or unrelated. Now, the TARP bonus bill is unrelated. There are a couple of other bills — ‘vehicles,’ they’re being called — that Reid could use and then call for a cloture vote. And because it’s not the overall health care bill, it’s likely the cloture vote would be lost because the people who are afraid to vote for cloture on a straight health care bill could then say, ‘Well, we weren’t voting on the health care bill. We were voting on the TARP bonus bill,’ or one other, two other bills that Reid might use if not the TARP bill. So there are two health bills in the Senate: One from the Harkin committee, one from the Baucus committee.

Harry Reid takes the best of both, he merges them, creates one Senate bill and attaches that as an amendment to a bill that either has something to do with health care or in the case of the TARP bonus bill has nothing to do with health care. And once they get cloture, he could drop that combined bill to the floor of the Senate, which includes Baucus and Harkin, and then they’d only need 50 votes to pass that final product because Biden would be there to provide 51 if necessary. Now, one of the questions here is: Can they get Senator Byrd to the chamber? He’s in poor health. If they can’t get Byrd to the chamber, the only need 11 votes. You have to assume they’re not gonna be able to get Byrd there. Now, we can also assume that we get all the Republicans and Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln; maybe Pryor, Landrieu, Bayh, McCaskill, Carper, Warner, Webb. But the Democrat side will get Specter and Bennett and Nelson and Shaheen and Conrad — and, in that situation, our side would lose.

There are a lot of people working behind the scenes targeting these individual Senators in a number of different ways to try to influence their votes. But once this happens, if Reid is able to pull this off — and, by the way, it’s not guaranteed. This is fraught with obstacles for Reid, but I’m just telling you what the latest trick is. If they succeed, this would then go to conference. And the plan is for Harry Reid to drop this, say, TARP bill with the health care amendment that has passed the Senate over to Pelosi, where she would rubber-stamp it in the conference. It would then be agreed to — and no amendments can be added in conference. They’re all going to be done before that. So once the House and Senate agree: Bammo! The bill goes up to Obama’s office. So the conference report would be put in play, and at that point there still has to be a vote on the conference report. The House and Senate both have to vote again on the final conference version, the combination of the House and Senate version.

So if Pelosi rubber-stamps what Reid sends her — and that’s problematic, too, because you’ve got so many disparate actors over in the House. The Congressional Black Caucus, the Barney Franks of the world, they may not agree to rubber-stamp depending on what’s in the Senate bill that Reid sends over. But if all this happens, then the conference bill is in play and then more lobbying will take place with all the questionable characters in the House and the Senate. But the plan as it is now is for Pelosi to rubber-stamp what Reid sends over because they’re working in advance on merging these two Senate bills to have it contain pretty much similar contents to what the House bill already has. And in this way, they get it on up there. The trick here, the trick here is that they would get to cloture without voting on a health care bill. They would get to cloture.

They’d get 60 votes on some unrelated bill with health care attached as an amendment, thereby getting all these Democrat senators who are scared to death to vote cloture for health care off the hook ’cause they can say, ‘Oh, I wasn’t voting on the health care bill. I was voting on TARP bonus bill.’ The thing about a TARP bonus bill is who’s going to vote against that on the Democrat side? Who in the world is going to vote against taxing bonuses paid to employees who work for TARP companies, people that got TARP money? The point is, folks, they don’t have 60 votes for this because the American people do not want this. They do not want this version, either the Senate versions or the House versions. They don’t have 60 votes. Harry Reid’s trying to get around getting 60 votes without having to go to reconciliation because that’s dynamite potentially for them. That’s a violation of Senate rules. Reconciliation, 51 votes essentially could only be used to pass budget bills, by law, by Senate rule. So they’re trying not to go that way, so this is a trick that they’re trying to get around the fact nobody wants what they’re concocting. It’s a trick to get around this whole 60 votes business. I explained this in the first hour of yesterday. Susan called late in the show and cited it right down the line, almost verbatim. It was a beautiful thing. She got it, which means a lot of other people got it, which means the country is even more wired against this today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I don’t know if it was the last liberal attached amendment trick to major legislation, but I do know that the Boland Amendment caused chaos and roiled this country. Do you remember what the Boland Amendment was? The Boland Amendment was an amendment — back in the mid-eighties — that was attached to a budget bill, and the Boland bill prohibited any financial aid to the freedom fighters in Nicaragua, the Contras. They attached it, this is something that they didn’t vote on specifically in the House, they voted on a budget bill, they attached it, and remember all the hell it caused. Some were saying that it was even unconstitutional at the time. But that was again when the Democrats back in the eighties were siding with a communist satellite, a Soviet satellite nation of Nicaragua under the tyranny of Daniel Ortega who is, by the way, back now and yuks it up with Barack Obama when they have meetings down there in Central and South America.

So here we have an attached amendment trick where Harry Reid is doing his best to try to avoid having to get 60 votes. They don’t have 60 votes. I should add this. The head count right now is they’ve got 58 votes for cloture on a straight down-the-line vote on either of the two health care bills in the Senate. They don’t have 60 so they can’t go the normal way. Health care, you know, taking over one-sixth of the economy as an amendment to a totally unrelated bill that will be easier to get cloture, and that’s the trick, that is what they’re doing, they are scheming against us, the American people. They know full well — these people read polls better than you and I do — and they know full well what our sentiments are. We want no part of this, and the numbers of people that want no part of this grow each and every day, hence the hurry and the speed and the necessity to get this done under parliamentary tricks. There’s nothing about this, folks, that’s illegal, I don’t want to stress that they’re violating any rules. They would be skirting that if they went the reconciliation route. They don’t want to do that, that is their last option. Reconciliation is simply, you know, budgets, that’s a constitutional requirement, so throw the 60 votes out, just 51 majority, simply majority to pass that, and that’s what they’re looking for to pass health care, and they’re trying to get it by having one-sixth of the economy being taken over as an amendment to some unrelated bill.

This is all a coordinated effort with Pelosi and Obama and people in the White House. So that is the status of things here. But as is the case, they don’t operate in secret anymore. They don’t get away with doing this stuff in a clandestine way where people don’t find out about it. People do find out about it, and it is simple to understand, when it’s explained properly, it is simple to understand. So the Democrat Party and the left once again showing they have no respect for the will or the desires of the American people. Representative republic with a small R, an obstacle to these people. Your liberty is an obstacle to these people. Your freedom of choice is an obstacle to the Democrat Party in 2009 and has been for years.

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