Thursday, March 25, 2010

What to Do with All the Pens: Parliamentarian Sends Bill Back to House

While America slept, one citizen stood up for the rule of law instead of the rule of (wo)men.

Alan Frumin is today every thoughtful citizen's hero. The Senate Parliamentarian agreed that at least two provisions of ObamaCare violate rules on reconciliation. Hence, the bill, once finished again in the Senate, must be voted again in the House.

Not that it's in danger of not passing, of course. However, as Senate Rs carpet bomb the capitol with amendments, including such cleverness as forbidding payment for ED drugs for sex offenders (with Coburn dryly suggesting that doing so would save about a quarter of a billion dollars, a made-up figure worthy of what this debate has become), it now becomes all rather more likely that Rs can corral some wayward Dems to risk a "yes" on some amendments (as in: After all, the House has to vote again anyway). The farcical theater continues, playing 20 hours a day in Washington, D.C.

So what's a person to do if s/he attended the raucous, profanity-laced signing party and got one of the twenty-two pens (surely the clearest of metaphors for the bill's excesses) used by BHO to sign the original measure? Are they now like a souvenir football, carried across the goal line in a big game but with the touchdown called back for a holding penalty?

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