I guess in politics you also reap what you sow. From The Hill:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is paying a price on healthcare reform for the arm-twisting she did on the climate change bill last month.

Democratic House members were rankled by how the climate bill passed — and stunned by the criticism they got at home.

Those memories are fueling a revolt among conservative Blue Dogs and a drive among freshman lawmakers to drop plans for a surtax on the wealthy in healthcare reform.

An aide to one conservative Democratic lawmaker said the climate bill was “really rammed down our throats.”

And there’s a general sense of unease among others members of the caucus.

“I think the well’s a bit poisoned,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.). “A lot of people went home and got beaten up on climate. Now they want to make sure they understand it before they vote on it. People still want to do it. It’s just going to be a little bit harder.”

Many centrist Democrats pushed Pelosi and the Democratic leadership to put off the climate change debate and pass a healthcare overhaul first, giving members more time to work through the issues and get comfortable with the complex issue.

And what still rubs many members raw is that if the climate bill ever comes back from the Senate, it’s likely to be significantly weaker. So they voted for tough and expensive regulations that will likely never become law.

The fresh memory of the difficult vote has hit the Democrats’ plan to pass a healthcare bill before August like a Mack truck.

It also looks like other sections of the Democratic Congress are just a little concerned:

Despite a massive listening campaign organized by Pelosi and other leaders, the objections to the healthcare bill are coming from diverse parts of the caucus.

Freshmen are circulating a letter calling for the surtax to be eliminated because they believe it will unfairly hit small businesses.

“Republicans called the last one a tax increase and it wasn’t. But this one really is,” said an aide to one Democratic freshman lawmaker.

Blue Dogs have a host of complaints, starting with irritation that the bill doesn’t wring enough cost savings out of the healthcare system and leaves Medicare reimbursement unfairly low in their rural districts. They launched a formal protest last week that delayed the rollout of the House bill.

But after Pelosi introduced it with great fanfare Tuesday, Blue Dogs complained that few, if any, of their concerns were fixed.

The conservative Blue Dog’s have a strategy:

So the Blue Dogs on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have banded together to change the bill. They’ve warned they have the votes to stop the bill in at least one committee if those changes aren’t made

This tactic is designed to weaken the divide-and-conquer strategy used in the climate bill. However, leadership aides note their own parties opposition members are not so much against a bill; the previous climate bill arm twisting and subsequent backlash in their own backyards gives angry Blue Dogs a chance to flex their muscles and demand changes necessary to alter the bill to one they can support. The elephant in the room is whether these markups avoid dooming America to sub-standard health care and unsustainable debt. The only way to avoid disaster is to do away with the public option in any form.

Even a public option that is allowed to compete with private insurance on an exchange (as the current bill is written), would push out private insurers and drive them out of business. Nobody can compete with a non-profit government capable of printing money when deemed necessary. The current bill is implicitly designed to destroy private insurance. I’m from Canada – trust me, you don’t want that system.

The Blue Dogs have the fate of the country in their hands. On their death beds will they remember their lives with fondness, pride, and a swelling sense of dignity, or know they have sold out the souls of countless millions and doomed them to an inkling of an existence? Will they uphold the spirit of our forefathers and preserve liberty and dignity? History, the cruelest judge of all, remembers. If they are principled enough to change the course of disaster set by Obama and avoid the destruction of the greatest of countries, they will be remembered as heroes; men and women of honest disposition, worthy of great praise. As for the other option – sellouts, crooks, pirates of liberty, spineless and unprincipled hacks – these words will describe the men and women who vote against principles of common sense, even though each and every one of these labels provides for a loftier descriptive for such lowly scoundrels.

Further Reading: Even The NYT Won’t Avoid The Truth – Socialized Healthcare Stinks

In related news and opinion:

Michelle Malkin: Inside the monstrous Obamacare bureaucracy. Also check out, Putting a face on the casualties of Obamacare.

Sister Toldjah: CBO pours cold water on Obama admin’s claims about “savings” from ObamaCare. Heh.

Stop the ACLU: Snowe Dampens Dems Healthcare Ardor and Polls Begin to Turn

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 9:02 am and is filed under General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.