Now that the House cleared the Senate healthcare “reform” bill to go to President Barack Hussein Obama’s desk for signing into law, the Senate must in turn approve a 153-page list of amendments via reconciliation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) says he has the votes to pass the bill by a simple majority, but in the process individual amendments may be revised – which would bounce the bill back into the House for another vote after Congress returns from a two-week Easter recess in mid-April.

The Washington Post reports that Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin will be pressed into service “to determine whether a tax on high-cost insurance policies would affect the Social Security trust fund, and whether that would violate prohibitions against altering Social Security through the reconciliation process”:

Assuming that hurdle is cleared, 20 hours of debate will begin Tuesday … Republicans expect to object to provisions that they think violate rules that require all reconciliation legislation to deal with federal revenue. …

If Republicans do not approve of Frumin's advice, they can try to override the ruling but that requires 60 votes, making it almost impossible for them to succeed, because they have 41 members in their caucus.

If Frumin sides with Republicans on a particular provision, it would be dropped from the amendments bill - unless Democrats can find 60 votes to override the ruling. That would be unlikely, given the unified opposition of Republicans to the Democratic bill. Such a ruling would not doom the legislation, but it would force the Senate to return the measure to the House for another vote.

Republicans have already warned their colleagues across the aisle that they plan to “fiercely challenge those parts of the package that must still win approval in the Senate,” reports The Boston Globe:

GOP leaders are preparing a last-minute battle plan designed to tie up the voting in procedural knots in the days ahead and, ideally, force yet another House vote on the reconciliation part of the package. They also hope to rally their base and weaken vulnerable Democrats in the midterm elections by hammering home forceful arguments against the legislation.

“We owe it to the American people to do the very best we can to keep this bill from passing,’’ Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, said yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.’’

Republicans’ ability to halt progress on the health care package, however, is limited to snarling up voting on a limited number of fixes still needing Senate approval - the core bill will become law as soon as the president signs it. But GOP leaders were also looking ahead and warning that Democrats would pay in the midterm elections. …

Senate rules cap debate at 20 hours, but Republicans can file as many amendments as they wish.

By forcing vote after vote on a hundreds of amendments, Repubs can drag the process out until Saturday.

But that won’t be the end of Republican challenges to the legislation. Reuters reports that Attorneys General in 11 states plan to file lawsuits contending that with the sweeping legislation, the federal government is “overstepping its constitutional powers and usurping states' sovereignty”:

States are concerned the burden of providing healthcare will fall on them without enough federal support.

Ten of the attorneys general plan to band together in a collective lawsuit on behalf of Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington.

A separate suit will be filed by VA Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, because the bill conflicts with a state law state legislators passed to reinforce their view that Congress cannot use the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution to force people to buy insurance. ID has passed a similar law – and 36 other states have introduced bills, regulations and amendments to their state constitution to void other aspects of the bill.

These moves are guaranteed to keep healthcare “reform” front and center as we slide towards the mid-term elections, undercutting the Dem spin that passing the bill is a political win. David Sanger The New York Times notes that it remains to be seen “[w]hether it was a historic achievement or political suicide for his party - perhaps both - he succeeded where President Bill Clinton failed in trying to remake American health care’ but that Obama “has lost something - and lost it for good”:

Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago - the promise of a “postpartisan” Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.

Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one. …

“In the short term Obama will get a boost, because the narrative is that he came back from the dead and got done what no president has managed to do in 70 years,” said Peter Wehner, who was a political adviser to President Bush. “But once people discover that their Medicare taxes are going up, that there are deeper cuts in Medicare Advantage, that there are court challenges to many provisions, and that the process of getting it passed created a portrait of corruption, it won’t sit well.”

“The 219-212 vote was bipartisan - in opposition, with 34 Democrats joining every single Republican in voting against the bill,” sneers Joseph Curl of The Washington Times, meaning that Dems will have no one to blame but themselves for the ongoing political fallout.

Echoing Winston Churchill, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) vowed: "We will fight in the courts, and we will fight in the rallies and the tea parties and the town hall meetings. And we will fight in the ballot booth, and we will prevail."

Editorial Note: McCain also said this: "We will challenge this in the courts. We will challenge this in the towns. We will challenge this in the cities. We will challenge this in the farms." And this: “We’ll challenge it every place we can. … [W]e’ll fight everywhere. … The American people don’t like it. And they are going to be heard, one way or the other.” Churchill only had to say it once to sound Churchillian, but if you string it all together, it's close enough. 

Obama Looking For Other Things To “Fix”

Now that he’s “fixed” our “broken healthcare system,” President Barack Hussein Obama wants to “fix” a "broken immigration system." In a video message to the throngs who marched through the streets of the nation’s capital yesterday - waving American flags, instead of Mexican and Aztlán flags, it should be noted - demanding immediate U.S. citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegals, Obama promised to stop “families being torn apart, employers gaming the system and police officers struggling to keep communities safe,” reports The Associated Press. 
 

Obama said not a word about how illegal immigration and chain migration has exacerbated the staggering unemployment rate of low-skilled black Americans for years – even as pro-illegal immigrant groups are trying to con blacks into committing socioeconomic suicide by abetting the push for amnesty. Nor did he discuss how forged documented aliens are gaming the system and victimizing millions of Americans through identity theft. Oh, and he also left out the part about the eye-popping rate of gang, drug and violent crimes committed by illegal aliens, as well as incarceration rates amongst this population.

Last week, Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) & Lindsey Graham (R- SC) Washington Post op-ed outlining a plan for immigration reform that Obama supports (issuing biometric Social Security cards; fulfilling and strengthening border security and interior enforcement; creating a process for admitting temporary workers; and implementing a tough but fair path to legalization for those already here that requires them to perform community service, pay fines and back taxes, pass background checks and be proficient in English). But now that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has muscled the healthcare bill all the way to the president’s desk, Graham says that it “will … pretty much kill any chance of immigration reform passing the Senate this year."

It’s just as well. The blueprint he and Schumer unveiled last week is short on detail – for instance, chain migration (second item) is ignored. As for the mandatory community service project the two Senators envision, The Stiletto proposes one week picking up the millions of pounds of trash left behind in the deserts of AZ by illegal border crossers and human smugglers. With 12 million illegal aliens working industriously eight hours a day for a week, the fragile Sonoran desert should soon be restored to pristine condition.
 

Life Imitates "Live Free or Die Hard"

The plotline of the fourth film in the “Die Hard” franchise involved a disgruntled former National Security Agency employee who wants to hack the computerized infrastructure that controls everything from the power grid, to traffic signals to electronic deposits in bank accounts in order to trigger a cascading failure of these systems. The New York Times reports that a paper published in the journal Safety Science by Chinese engineering student Wang Jianwei, “Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid,” is causing all kinds of agita for the Obama administration: 
  

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said … he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.

“We usually say ‘attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

The difference between Mr. Wang’s explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction. …

The issue of Mr. Wang’s paper aside, experts in computer security say there are genuine reasons for American officials to be wary of China, and they generally tend to dismiss disclaimers by China that it has neither the expertise nor the intention to carry out the kind of attacks that bombard American government and computer systems by the thousands every week.