At Philadelphia Town Hall meeting, Arlen Specter takes heat for attempting to defend the indefensible

What are the arguments one can adduce in favor of mindlessly rushing through Congress a pivotal piece of legislation — one that will have a profound and far reaching effect on the lives of voters? As Senator Arlen Specter discovered recently, much to his chagrin, there simply aren’t any.

The enormity of Specter’s stupidity in attempting to justify his and other lawmakers dereliction of duty in failing to read the proposed legislation is simply astounding. The fundamental issue — which voters understand — is this: is it asking too much for our lawmakers to actually read proposed legislation which they intend to foist upon the public? The proposed health care legislation is a 1,000 + page legislative leviathan, and few lawmakers have any idea of the nature of the provisions contained therein.

Senator Specter seems to be a proponent of the new legislative standard for Congressional due diligence established by Rep. John Conyers when he idiotically proclaimed: “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

One of the supposed virtues of a representative, versus a direct participatory democracy, is that voters entrust their elected representatives to discharge the duties of making laws for the public good on their behalf. As is apparent to everyone, save for those actually entrusted to fulfill this obligation, trying to revamp an important sector of the nation’s economy when few legislators actually have read the bill and thus, are woefully ignorant about its provisions, is a manifest dereliction of this duty.

By asserting at the Town Hall meeting that Congress needs to “Do this fast”, Specter  acted as if a radical restructuring of 1/6 of the nation’s economy, a fundamental alteration in the relationships between citizens and their government as well as between patients and their doctors, is akin to a congressional resolution naming a park or a federal office building. If Specter is oblivious to the difference, his constituents were not, as evidenced by the resounding expression of their collective disapprobation.

By his feeble attempt to defend the stunning alacrity with which major proposed health care reform legislation was produced in the House and the Senate — a response that elicited rancor from the crowd — Specter’s posture on the matter not only indicates a profound disconnect between Washington and Main Street, but also demonstrates how out of touch he and other lawmakers are with those whose interests they purportedly serve. How does willful ignorance about the provisions of major legislation make for good law? Many voters are asking the same simple question: why the rush? And politicians, like Specter, don’t have an appropriate response.

The political process that is producing health care reform legislation is starting to resemble the manner in which the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill was crafted and almost foisted upon a public that was steadfastly opposed to the very premise of the legislation. When many of the mischievous provisions of that piece of legislation were unceremoniously disclosed, it caused an uproar that led to the bills ignominious defeat.

During the month of August, the proposed health care package will be scrutinized carefully and many of its provisions disclosed to an already leery public. Given the disjointed nature of the various proposals working their way through the various House and Senate Committees, and the extent of voter antipathy to the type of “reform” Obama and his fellow Democrats have in mind, there is the very real likelihood that Obama’s health care initiative may meet the same fate as Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

In the wake of the abysmal administrative bungling of the Cash for Clunkers program, and as publicity of more wasteful economic stimulus gems trickle out during August, many voters will inevitably conclude that the federal government has no business running health care. Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to villainize the insurance companies will do nothing to attenuate this sentiment.

Voter anger with Congress on health care is palpable and growing, and could be summarized best by the words of one of the participants of the Philadelphia Town Hall meeting who decried to Specter:

“I look at this health care plan and I see nothing that is about health or about care. What I see is a bureaucratic nightmare, senator. Medicaid is broke, Medicare is broke, Social Security is broke and you want us to believe that a government that can’t even run a cash for clunkers program is going to run one-seventh of our U.S. economy? No sir, no.”