What a day this will be. Just as a side note, I love the Blair House. It's beautiful inside and has a quaint colonial outside feel.
To start things off, House Minority Leader John Boehner has an op-ed on AOL today saying the only way to do HCR is if both Dem bills are trashed and the process is started over...he then goes on to call the minority party the party of the people. If that was the case they would be the majority party. That's how a democracy works.
So right off the bat Republicans want Dem ideas scrapped. What a way to negotiate. Here's a list of attendees. And here's a list of Republican ideas.
*Update:
I'm sitting here watching the most fascinating thing unfold on television that I've seen in a long time. Two very different political parties led by a president that really wants people to work together to solve the nation's health care problems, are sitting at a table with cameras listening and watching their every move. It's amazing to nerdy political boys like me.
What if this would have happened for the trillion dollar expansion of Medicare Republicans rammed through congress? Or what if something like this would have happened with Bush's tax cuts? Things would be very different today.
Nonetheless, something that jumped out from the beginning was Sen. Lamar Alexander's (R-TN) statement that something as large as HCR has never been pushed through with "reconciliation." That's obviously a lie.
*Editor's Note:
Spinner in the comments section makes note that Bush's trillion dollar expansion of Medicare was not passed through "reconciliation." The correction is so noted.
**Update:
Quote of the day: Sen. Dick Durbin finally calls Republicans on their b.s. when it comes to giving themselves government health care.
"You think it's a socialist plot and it's wrong? For goodness sakes, drop out of the federal employees health benefit program."
Of course Republicans won't do that because, like I've been saying, they love them some socialist medicine.
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