Democratic bleating over growing opposition to Pelosi/Obama-style reform -- opposition generally portrayed in the District of Obama as willful or selfish -- can't disguise reality. An August recess from bleating is just what the doctor ordered. Our representatives need to go home, face the voters and find out whether the reform style on the table is what said voters really want. If it seems to be -- with voter assent signified by the simple act of piping down -- then it's coming our way. If, however, the cost, and the degree of nannylike oversight envisioned by the plan rub us wrong, that, too, is democracy. Better to have a kind of referendum now before the cell door slams and the Democrats flip through our wallets to see what they want to buy next.
A vast variety of arguments can be made against DemoCare, a particularly salient one being that we haven't even talked this one through. An extra trillion-to-trillion-and-a-half of our money ... for what? Does Nancy Pelosi know? How could she? Nobody can know. One can project -- that's all, according to one's presumptions, which probably won't match the presumptions of someone else sitting two feet away
Nobody knows. Yet Nancy Pelosi wants to flog this one through so she can flog something else through, like cap-and-trade policies to fight global warming.
Mrs. Pelosi doesn't care, apparently, whether the voters trust her. Wherefore it has come to this: The administration we looked to for "change" and "unity" works night and day to force-feed us its ideas and plans and designs.
Don't ask question is the administration's slogan. Don't hold open hearings. Don't call in the expert on both sides. Don't try to make the thing right -- try to make it happen.
August can't come too soon. We need a break for thought -- a pause that refreshes bare and banal discourse. The voters need to see their representatives, hear them, speak to them and listen as they speak back. How odd such an approach may seem in the District of Obama. In venues less exalted they have a name for it -- democracy.