“In the age of the Internet, Congress should be able to get the final bill up on government websites for a legitimate public review and comment period lasting two weeks, where constituent comments would be directly forwarded to the people’s Senators and Representatives,” Wilson said.

“There is too much at stake,” Wilson said, adding, “this is a bill that will nationalize one-sixth of the American economy, downgrade research and development in the medical sciences, take private options away from patients forcing them onto a government-run plan, ration health care away from seniors, and bankrupt the Treasury.”

“The American people have a right to know exactly what’s in the final version of this bill before Congress takes it up again,” Wilson declared, noting that “Nobody will know what the secret deliberations between Senate and House leaders will produce until the bill is posted publicly.”

Wilson said a Senate deal reached to secure Senator Ben Nelson’s (D-NE) support for a government “takeover” of the nation’s health care system “highlights the need for real transparency in the nation’s legislative processes.”

The deal would require every state except Nebraska to pay for the cost of expanded Medicaid eligibility (up to 133 percent of the poverty level) under the legislation.

The deal, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) called a “bribe,” is worth at least $45 million to Nebraska over the first ten years of the bill, according to the Washington Times.

Wilson said that “with real transparency, such an unseemly deal would never be allowed to occur,” and today along with 23 other free market and limited government leaders called on Senate and House leaders to take up C-SPAN’s offer to televise negotiations reconciling both versions of the legislation, fulfilling a campaign promise made by Barack Obama.

According to the letter, Obama “has broken a campaign promise he made multiple times that healthcare negotiations be public and broadcast on C-SPAN. The president’s broken promise indicates a lack of transparency in his administration and sends a clear signal that he is hiding details of the bill from the American people.”

The 24 leaders noted that Obama “made such a promise at least eight times, yet it was reported last Tuesday that the Democrat congressional leadership will bypass the traditional conference committee process.”

Wilson said the broken C-SPAN pledge was “just the tip of the iceberg,” and that “the American people need the time to weigh in on what is actually the eighth version of the government health care takeover.”

Wilson said the eight versions of what he dubbed “ObamaCare” were: 1-3) three House committee versions; 4) HR 3200, the House passed version of “public option”; 5) Baucus co-ops, the Senate Finance Committee version; 6) the Senate “public option,” which Senator Joe Lieberman and other lawmakers objected to; 7) the Reid substitute that the Senate passed, and 8 ) the current House-Senate version that Congressional Democrats are now meeting on to discuss.

“This is too much for the American people to keep up with,” Wilson explained. “The biggest advantage this bill presently has is its intentional ambiguity. Every time they create a new bill with new provisions, once the details get out, it proves unpopular, and so they go back to the drawing board with yet another bill.”

That is why Wilson said the final version should be posted on the Internet for two weeks prior to any votes. “With a sufficient period for comment by the American people, there will be no question as to where they stand on a bill that threatens to take over one-sixth of the American economy by government.”

Based on what they currently know, voters are opposed to the bill, according to Rasmussen Reports. In the organization’s latest poll, some 55 percent of likely voters are opposed to the legislation, which only 40 percent support.

Wilson said that a two-week comment period could actually help lawmakers to develop support for the measure, “if that were their goal.”

“National polls have shown overwhelming opposition to this legislation for months on end,” Wilson noted. “A major reason for that has been the lack of transparency: the secret deals for Nebraska and Louisiana; the fuzzy numbers used to manipulate CBO budget scoring to achieve a ‘deficit-neutral’ score; the use of the Medicare Independent ‘Advisory’ Board for health care rationing away from seniors; and the upward pressure the bill will place on health premiums that Congress does not want you to know about.”

“Overall, the public is getting the sense that Congress is trying to pull a fast one on the American people,” Wilson said, concluding, “Instead, here’s a novel idea: why not be transparent about what’s actually in the bill and let it pass or fail on its merits?”

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In an ALG News exclusive video, Dr. Biden, while promoting a national education initiative on behalf of the Obama Administration at Benjamin Banneker Senior High School in Washington, D.C., said she had not “followed” the elimination of the popular program in 2009.

When asked if she supported the program’s elimination, Dr. Biden said, “You know, I really haven’t followed it.”

“I’ve been really busy,” she added.

Dr. Biden, a public school teacher and professor for more than 28 years and an adjunct professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, has been a top spokesperson for the Obama Administration on education policy. It was the Obama Administration that abandoned the youth education program, despite polls showing that 75 percent of District residents supported it.

Wilson said it is “simply inexcusable that Dr. Biden, a prominent education policy spokesperson for the White House, is completely ignorant of the elimination of the D.C. school choice program. It was her boss who scuttled the program — while sending his own children to private schools, of course.”

Congress voted to eliminate funding for the program in 2009 in “The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009”, which was passed by the House on February 25th and by the Senate on March 10th, as reported by the Brookings Institution. Barack Obama actively supported the program’s elimination.

National Public Radio Senior Correspondent and Fox News commentator Juan Williams has called the elimination of the Opportunity Scholarship Program an “outrageous sin against our kids.”

“If there is one goal that deserves to be held above day-to-day partisanship and pettiness of ordinary politics it is the effort to end the scandalous poor level of academic achievement and abysmally high drop-out rates for America’s black and Hispanic students,” Williams wrote.

“By going along with Secretary Duncan’s plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage,” Williams added.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) was established by the U.S. Congress in 2003 with the “D.C. School Choice Incentive Act.” According to the OSP website, the five year pilot program provided “genuine school choice for low-income families in the form of scholarships for children to attend K-12 non-public schools within the District’s boundaries. The maximum annual scholarship amount of $7,500 per child is available for families at or below 185% of the federal poverty level ($39,220 for a family of four).”

Wilson said that D.C. students, who attend some of the lowest-ranked public schools in the nation, “have been cheated out of the opportunity to receive a better education simply because the public education unions demanded the elimination of a very popular program, and they donate almost exclusively to Democrats.”

According to a Braun Research poll, 75 percent of District residents support the city’s federally funded school voucher program.

“Parents have a right to choose which school they want to send their children to, and Dr. Biden, a prominent education policy spokesperson for the White House, has not even taken the time to follow the elimination of a program that helped needy D.C. students to get a better education,” Wilson concluded.

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“The Senate, before it votes to fill this critical position, has a duty to ascertain if Mr. Southers favors mandatory union bargaining over the safety and security of the American people,” said Wilson.

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has placed a legislative hold on Southers, preventing him from being confirmed via unanimous consent. It takes 60 votes in the Senate to break the hold. Speaking on NBC News this morning with Matt Lauer, DeMint said, “what I’ve asked for, Matt, is just some debate and a recorded vote. They… want to pass Mr. Southers in… secret, without a recorded vote. I think there’s some significant issues. I’ve asked him if he is going to change the policy of collective bargaining within the TSA and he will not give me a straight answer.”

Wilson responded to charges that DeMint’s hold prevented Southers from being confirmed. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did not even schedule a floor vote on Southers prior to the botched terror attack of Flight 253 on Christmas,” said Wilson, “because filling the position was not a top priority of the Senate.”

“A simple up or down vote could have had the nominee confirmed already. Reid doesn’t even need DeMint to lift the hold, he knows it, and has even acknowledged it,” Wilson said, pointing to a December 29th statement by Reid, “I will file cloture on Mr. Southers’ nomination when the Senate reconvenes in January…”

“Instead,” Wilson said, “Reid has sought to use the terror attack as means of confirming an otherwise objectionable nominee,” Wilson said, adding, “Which, is exactly how the Senate confirmed Kathleen Sebelius to the Department of Health and Human Services when they used the H1N1 scare as a means of skipping objections.”

In a statement on January 1st, DeMint said, “Erroll Southers has not been forthcoming about whether he’ll give union bosses control of our airport security, which is one of the most important decisions he’ll make as head of the TSA. Mr. Southers’ unwillingness to form a position on collective bargaining seriously calls into question his judgment, because it weakens security and has already been rejected by the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, and by every previous TSA administrator.”

In testifying in front of Congress in November, Southers declined to say whether he would support collective bargaining or not. Wilson said he was “dodging.”

“Mr. Southers ought to have an opinion about whether union bargaining would harm the administration of transportation security or not,” Wilson explained, adding, “The fact that he did not deny it outright is troubling enough, since it indicates that he is considering it.”

“The least Southers should be saying is that if union bargaining over security procedures would undermine said security, he would reject it,” Wilson said. “If he cannot be that specific, the Senate has no reason but to assume he’s attempting to conceal his agenda, and that security is not his number one priority.”

As reported by the Federal Times, Southers “pledged to review the issue and said he would talk to a cross-section of stakeholders, including employees, before making a decision.”

“Mr. Southers ought to just answer Senator DeMint’s very simple question so Senators can make an informed vote on the nomination,” Wilson said, adding, “The advice and consent of the Senate is not a guarantee.”

Wilson said Southers should be rejected, regardless, for “abusing his position to order background searches on his wife’s boyfriend in the 1980’s.”

As reported by PoliJam, “Errol Southers, a former FBI agent, had reportedly used his office in the 1980s to access a federal database in order to look into the background of his then-estranged wife’s new boyfriend. In a sworn affidavit on October 22, Southers gave certain details about the incident to the Senate homeland security committee, only to later notify the committee on November 20th that his first account was incorrect after the committee had already approved his nomination the day before on November 19.”

“What is emerging with Mr. Southers is a pattern of dodging questions, withholding information, and changing stories,” Wilson said, concluding, “None of which qualifies him to head the TSA, although he may have a future in politics. The Senate should reject this nomination and send a message to Barack Obama that the TSA needs to be headed by a nominee who has a demonstrated ability and willingness to be forthcoming to Congress about what is good security policy, and what is not.”

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“So-called Blue Dog ‘conservative’ Democrats in the House have long touted their caucus as being fiscally-responsible, but what emerges from an analysis of their voting records is a pack of lapdogs who have voted largely in lock-step with their more radical counterparts in House leadership,” said Wilson.

“In vote after vote, the Blue Dogs have been all bark and no bite. Although they had the votes to do so, they have not stopped a single piece of budget-busting legislation in a year that saw the largest budget deficit in American history: $1.4 trillion,” Wilson explained.

“By over a 4 to 1 margin, so-called ‘moderates’ in the House have voted with the bankrupt Pelosi agenda of Big Government,” Wilson added.

The analysis shows 856 Yea votes and 207 Nay votes, which Wilson said “was not enough to stop anything.”

The ALG analysis includes votes on the $789 billion “stimulus”, bankruptcy mortgage “cramdowns,” ACORN funding, a $108 billion International Monetary Fund expansion, the Waxman-Markey carbon emission caps, the $2.1 trillion “public option” health system, the $154 billion assistance program for bankrupt states, and the $290 billion debt limit expansion.

According to the Blue Dogs’ website, “In the 111th Congress, the Coalition intends to continue to make a difference in Congress by forging middle-ground, bipartisan answers to the current challenges facing the Country. A top priority will be to refocus Congress on balancing the budget and ridding taxpayers of the burden the debt places on them.”

“By its own measure, the Blue Dog coalition has not succeeded,” Wilson noted. “The House of Representatives this year alone has voted to spend more than $3.6 trillion, to nationalize the health care system, to strangle the nation’s access to energy, and to bankrupt the Treasury—and yet the Blue Dog and so-called ‘moderate’ Democrats have done nothing to stop the profligate financial catastrophe unfolding at the nation’s Capitol,” Wilson said.

Wilson pointed to the record national debt which currently stands at over $12 trillion, as placing an “insurmountable burden on the next generation of Americans.” The total debt is projected to top the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2011 at over $14 trillion. By 2020, it will top $20 trillion.

Wilson said that if entitlement spending is not reined in, it will soon half of the entire budget. According to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), entitlement spending as a percentage of budget outlays will continue to increase over the next decade. In 2019, OMB projects that entitlements spending will stand at $2.482 trillion (45.93 percent of outlays totaling $5.403 trillion).

According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, by 2050 entitlement spending “will consume nearly the entire federal budget.”

“While the nation is going bankrupt, House Blue Dogs and ‘moderate’ Democrats pretend that their support for these terrible pieces of legislation is ‘deficit-neutral.’ They have done nothing to stop the madness, which will only bankrupt the Treasury, destroy the dollar, and saddle American taxpayers without a debt that cannot be paid.”

Attachments:
“Blue Dogs and Moderate Democrats Voting Records, 2009,” Americans for Limited Government.

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“The Independent Medicare Advisory Board will become the Healthcare Soviet—dictating rules, rates and procedures in America’s health care system with no appeal. That is why Reid has given it the most protection,” Wilson explained.

In the Reid Substitute, under Section 3403 in a section entitled “Limitations on Changes to this Subsection,” it states, “It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.”

Section 3403 establishes the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB), which would “reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending” under the Reid substitute. Wilson said that is “rationing.”

“The whole purpose of this panel is to ration health care to seniors, no question,” Wilson said.

“To hide that, the bill states that ‘The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care’ right after it gets through establishing the power for the IMAB to ration health care,” Wilson explained.

“This is Orwellian Newspeak of the first order,” Wilson declared, adding, “Right in this section, Harry Reid is saying that they’re going to ration health care away from seniors, but they’re just not going to call it that.”

“And then, to lock it in place, Reid goes as far as to require a two-thirds vote in order to amend or repeal the rationing board,” Wilson explained.

The Senate rules change was exposed on the floor of the Senate by Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), as reported by the National Review Online. Senator DeMint said, “This is not legislation. This is not law. This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a Senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or repeal the law.”

DeMint said that under Senate rules, it should take a two-thirds vote of the Senate to invoke cloture on legislation that contains such rules changes. And, that, “[A]s the chair has confirmed, Rule 22, paragraph 2, of the standing rules of the Senate, states that on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the senators present and voting.”

However, the Senate President ruled that the rules change was not a rules change, but a change in procedure.

“This is completely unconstitutional,” Wilson noted, pointing to Article I, Section 5 of the Federal Constitution, which states: “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings…”

“Under current rules, the Reid substitute, which includes a rules change making it out of order to amend or repeal a section of the bill, should require a two-thirds vote in order to be enacted,” Wilson explained, concluding, “That has not happened, and will not happen, meaning that once passed, any attempt to remove the health care rationing board will be deemed out of order forevermore. People are going to die.”

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The Alert is an online news wire and aggregation service provided for media outlets to enable them to instantly access the top news in the nation’s capital. Bipartisan and all-inclusive, The Alert, as its tagline proclaims, provides “The top news. All the time. In an instant.”

According to Washington News Alert Bureau Chief, Robert Romano, “The Alert is a valuable resource for reporters to turn to get original source material. As newsmakers send us their releases, statements, speeches, multimedia, etc., they will be fed into The Alert directly so that reporters will have a single source, turn-to site to get their hands on political news—directly from the newsmakers without any filters.”

Added Senior Editor Adam Bitely, “We have aggregated D.C.’s top media outlets that utilize RSS feeds, top newsmakers who utilize Twitter, and top national political bloggers into a single system that updates itself every time those outlets are updated.”

According to Bitely, the National News section includes top national, D.C. news outlets, such as Politico, Washington Examiner, Congressional Quarterly, and more than two-dozen others. As those outlets release breaking news, it is automatically included in The Alert.

“The Alert will help political reporters, opinion leaders, bloggers, and editors to keep up to date with the headlines, as well as what top newsmakers are saying as soon as it happens,” Romano said.

The Alert contains four prominent features:

• the Twitter feed of top DC tweeters;
• the National News feed of the latest headlines from the Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Politico, Congressional Quarterly, and other DC news outlets;
• the blog feed from top political bloggers; and
• the Breaking News & Commentary feed, which will include Congressional and not-for-profit releases, statements, opeds, etc. as well as “breaking news that ALG-NRN News identifies throughout the day, and up-to-the-minute,” said Romano.

Romano reminded elected officials, news outlets, bloggers, activists and organizations nationwide to send breaking news tips and headlines to press@washingtonnewsalert.com. Newsmaker Tweeters should contact Alert Senior Editor Adam Bitely at adam@netrightnation.com about adding their Twitter feed to the system.

“We look forward to adding new features to The Alert as time goes forward, and we encourage user feedback to help us with making those improvements,” Romano said, concluding, “Our goal is that The Alert will get better and better, and not miss a beat.”

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According House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s website, the bill (HR 2847) in total will cost $154 billion of taxpayer funds allocated from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

“The House has abandoned all sense of decency. No sooner than the banks pay back the TARP does Congress just take the money shell it out to bankrupt states and union bosses,” said Wilson.

“These are not loans to the states and public sector unions. They are Christmas gifts,” Wilson noted. “They will never be paid back. That $154 billion is gone. So much for TARP ‘paying for itself’—Congress has just poured it down the sewer of insolvency.”

The final vote in the House was 217-212 in favor of the $154 billion bailout.

Yesterday, in a letter Wilson urged members of the House to reject the bailout of state governments with taxpayer funds paid back by banks through the TARP.

Wrote Wilson, “Bailing states out of their own reckless decisions is as irresponsible as bailing out poor decisions by investment firms, or GSE’s like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I urge you to vote no on this legislation, which will raid TARP funds in a kickback to public sector unions that donated generously to your campaign coffers.”

This new $154 billion bill includes $48.3 billion in funds for highway construction unions and other infrastructure spending and another $23 billion for public education unions.

The $789 billion “stimulus” bill also contained $53.6 billion to bail out state and local governments.

Speaking on December 3rd in Washington, Barack Obama announced the plan: “Next year we’re going to still have some of those challenges because usually state and local government revenues lag the recovery as a whole. They may need some more help from the federal government.”

Obama indicated the federal government had a responsibility to engage in deficit-spending on behalf of revenue-strapped states. “Frankly, because state and local governments generally don’t have the capacity to engage in deficit spending, some of that obligation falls on the federal government,” said Obama.

“Transferring bailout funds to public sector unions in bankrupt states is the final insult for American taxpayers, who are being straddled with an insane $12 trillion debt that cannot possibly be paid back,” Wilson said, concluding, “Never have the American people been so poorly represented by Congress.”

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