What Obama hath wrought: updates on the continuing conflict

It's a beautiful thing the way Obama has brought us all together.

This is war:

The health care debate is beginning to resemble trench warfare. You have two camps -- the Yeses and the Nos. They spend most of their time launching artillery attacks on the opposing position. Every so often, though, a soldier traverses No Man's Land as he rushes to join the other side.

So far four Nos have joined the Yeses. But there is a larger, much more undefined, group of Yeses slowly crawling across the barren wasteland toward the No trench.

Let us pray that this is so. RTR.

Sen. Orrin Hatch has some news for spineless House Dems:

Prolife Democrats in the House, who supported the Stupak amendment, are coming under intense pressure to vote for the Senate health care bill and are desperately trying to find a way to change those provisions that allow taxpayer funding of abortion. I wish it were that easy. But to my friends in the House, who are looking to pass a fix separately, I have a regrettable piece of news: I tried to include a strict prohibition of federal dollars for elective abortion in the bill in December, but my amendment lost by a vote of 54 to 45. Absent an ironclad guarantee from Senate Democratic Leadership and the White House, which I’ve not seen, the only way to ensure there is no taxpayer funding of abortion is to vote no on the Senate bill. I don’t know many Senate Democrats who’d go along with this.

Boehner calls for a roll call vote.

Michelle Malkin is keeping a cave-in watch.

Cao gets squishy again:

. . . he “hopes to reconsider” his vote on the health-care bill this weekend, should House Speaker Nancy Pelosi guarantee, “with certainty,” that she can fix its abortion language in a separate, later legislative measure.

130+ economists attest that the bill will kill jobs.

Rich Lowry agrees with my post today that, should it pass, the awful bill will make things worse rather than better for Obama.

Jim Geraghty seconds that, eloquently:

But if it passes Sunday, as of Monday, if Americans have problems with their health care, they know where to send their complaints. If your premiums jump, thank most House Democrats, Senate Democrats, and the Obama administration. If your doctor takes early retirement, you know who to call. If you can't get an appointment because the system suddenly has 30 million new patients, don't blame the GOP. Patient care, premiums, what's covered, access to prescription drugs, the rate of innovation in new drugs and procedures, the out-of-date magazines in the waiting room - hey, it's all Obama's show now. We laid out all the reasons this wasn't going to work according to plan. (Exhibit A: government programs never work according to plan.)

A lot of Democrats seem to think that they'll vote this into law, and then the anger will go away. Nope. In the months and years to come, they'll have the anger of the opponents and the anger of all the supporters who thought this would give them top-dollar care for low costs.

Just reading that makes me feel queasy. An added benefit: health-care hell will never end. Fred Barnes:

But Democrats wouldn't give up. Having gone to great lengths to enact ObamaCare, they'd go all out to protect it or revive it. Mrs. Pelosi is already talking about expanding ObamaCare. She favors adding a "public option" to compete with private insurers. "Once we kick through this door [and pass it], there'll be more legislation to follow," she told liberal bloggers on Monday. [Harry Reid has just promised a vote on the public option in the next few months.]

So the struggle would go on and on. If you think the fights over funding of Medicare and Medicaid in recent years have been unpleasant, wait until the funding battles over ObamaCare start. It's all but inevitable that they would occur every year given the way Mr. Obama has proposed to finance his health-care program.

Worst. President. Ever.

Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

Most recent posts here.