December 22, 2009--The GOP Death Panel

Republican reality finally caught up with its own rhetoric.

All summer long, during the teabaggers’ assault on any form of health care reform, one of the harshest criticisms of the Democrats’ plans was the allegation that they included requirements to fund death panels, which would make life and especially death decisions about critically ill people.

This falsehood, largely promulgated by Sarah Palin as a way to keep herself in the public spotlight pending the publication of her book and its marketing blitz, claimed that this was a cost-cutting strategy—the more old people Democrats could kill the less they would have to spend on providing late-in-life care. She even went so far as to say that these panels, to save money, would also decide to kill children such as Trig, her son who has Down’s Syndrome.

Then there was GOP Senator Chuck Grassley who in August on Face the Nation told Bob Schieffer that "There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life. And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

We haven’t heard that much lately about these illusory pull-the-plug panels but the damage is done. Ask a random sample of seniors down here in Florida about them and at least half will tell you that having the “government” make these kinds of decisions is one of the things that more than anything else scares them. And if I were poor old Senator Grassley, considering how he appears to be doddering around these days, I too would be scared.

But then topping them all we had Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Cornyn who on Saturday night during the debate about the Senate’s version of the health care bill asked his colleagues and all Americans to invoke God in a last ditch effort to derail health care reform.

According to the linked article from the New York Times, speaking on the Senate floor, as inarticulately as he usually does, he attempted to lead us in prayer--


"What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight. That's what they ought to pray. So that we can ... get the middle of America and the middle of the Senate a bill that can run through this country and actually do what we say we all want to do."

No one there or watching on C Span failed to miss his point. To end the filibuster Democrats needed all 60 of their members to vote for cloture. Including gravely ill, 92 year-old Senator Robert Byrd, the Senate’s longest serving member. With a blizzard raging outside, knowing that the Democrats had the 60 votes they needed, no one on the Republican side had the customary courtesy to allow one of their members to vote as Senator Byrd was intending so he could stay home and out of the blizzard that was raging and where he might catch a . . . deathly cold. And so, bundled in blankets, Senator Byrd had to be brought to the Senate in a Humvee and pushed to his desk in a wheelchair.

Thus, with Senator Byrd slumped in his front row seat within direct sight of Senator Cornyn as he rose to invoke his prayer, it was obvious to all that he was calling on God to convene His death panel and take Senator Byrd from us so that the Democrats would have only 59 votes, health care reform would fail, and the 30 million who would be covered by this far-from-perfect bill would remain uninsured, and up to 35,000 of them a year would die as a result.

Now that’s what I call a death panel!