Long strange trip, or: How a bill shouldn't become law

Tea-time tab dump:

This will help a lot:

While Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks “Deem and Pass,” President Barack Obama is going a different route – he’s talking to Fox News.

In an “extended, exclusive” interview tomorrow he will sit down with Special Report anchor Bret Baier to make his health care reform pitch to the FNC audience. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

And we're still ridin' that train.

There's a bit of trouble with CBO's efforts to score "the bill" (pictured below):

The word around Washington is that there is no CBO score of the reconciliation package because the Democrats can't find a way to make the bill reduce the deficit by the legally-required $1 billion through 2014.

Daniel Foster adds:

It is almost as if the reconciliation process were ill-suited for something like Obamacare.

John Hood will not comply:

I have decided that I will not obey the dictates of any federal bureaucrat who tries to impose a tax or regulation on me by citing the authority of an Obamacare bill that fails to pass both houses of Congress as required by our Constitution.

James Taranto on ObamaCare and eugenics:

What Stupak is hearing from his colleagues is not the pro-choice argument that the government should permit abortion as a matter of individual liberty. Rather, they claim that the government should encourage abortion as a social expedient--a cost-cutting measure.

Read the rest.

Title of the day from John Podhoretz: How a Bill Becomes Law in Three Minutes—and How a Party Becomes Toast in Six Months

There will be a lull right after President Obama signs it, as the media drop consideration of the controversy to discuss just how historic the historic nature of the historic legislation is, historically speaking, in historic terms … and then Congress will return home for the Easter recess on March 26, and all hell will break loose.

Runner-up title, but winner for best illustration, from Jim Geraghty: 'I'm a Bill, I've Been Deemed, and I'm Even Worse Than You Dreamed':

Fox News Jon Scott: Pardon my skepticism, but you're talking about a trillion dollar bill you're talking about rearranging maybe a sixth of the American economy, it would seem to be unusual to enact this into law without a vote in the House of Representatives.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn: Well, let's get away from the trillion dollar bill. Remember, we're still talking about the bill that was passed by the senate. And last time I checked the score on the senate bill was, like, $850 billion. We did a trillion dollars on the house side, and that's not what we voted on. We will deem passed the Senate bill which was much less than that.

But . . . the Senate bill isn't the bill that will become "law." That "bill" doesn't exist yet. And Clyburn knows it.

Most recent posts here.