Know Thine Enemy

At the Weekly Standard blog, Jeffrey Anderson channels the ghost of Tip O’Neill:

Michael Barone writes:

“Remember the old Tip O’Neill story: after an aide referred to the House Republicans as “the enemy,” O’Neill corrected him. “The House Republicans are not the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.”

Nevertheless, the Obama administration (itself fast becoming the truest enemy of the House) wants the House to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare, hand it over to the president to sign into law, and then trust that the Senate will then — and only then — begin to fix some of the parts of the bill to which the House most strongly objects.  Oh, and the Senate would do so using a “budget reconciliation” process that Americans strongly oppose, and would do so even though it would then be making the bill look more like what the House wanted and less like what the Senate wanted.  Meanwhile, the administration would have lost all interest and would therefore be putting no pressure on the Senate to act, because it would then already have its coveted comprehensive bill in hand.

One wonders how easily the administration thinks the House can be conned — and what Tip O’Neill would say to all of this.

Furthermore, this assumes that the House would want the Senate bill even after reconciliation — a major leap.  For this would still be the same bill that the American people so vehemently oppose, the same bill that would allow taxpayer funding of abortion (which the House bill would not allow and which reconciliation, even if it doesn’t turn out to be a phantom, wouldn’t fix), and the same bill that propelled Scott Brown into the “enemy” chamber.

And speaking of Democrats, Congress, enemies, and opposition, also at the Standard, John McCormack writes, “Nancy Pelosi Gets Angry, Calls Pro-Life Democrats Liars.”

Hopefully Nancy won’t flip out against McCormack himself in a fashion reminiscent of her fellow distaff liberals Dede Scozzafava and (via her staffer) Martha Coakley.