Harry Reid Can't Hide from Sarah Palin

Harry Reid tried to hide behind 2,000 some pages of dense, deadly dull legislation, but Sarah Palin spotted him skulking around the Senate and bagged herself a bunch of Democrats up to no good.

It seems the Senator slipped into the National Healthcare legislation on page 1,000 or so an unelected regulatory commission that would have near omniscient control over the quality and extent of everyone's healthcare. In other words, a "Death Panel." But he also inserted an outrageous provision prohibiting any Congressional oversight or control of any kind over this Death Panel. That's right, the Death Panel would be like, I don't know, a separate country or something and not subject to Congress' jurisdiction. Here is an exact quote from the bill:

it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.

You can't make this stuff up.

It's all a procedural trick of course, as explained here. Especially so as, under the Constitution, future Senate bodies can change by a simple majority vote most things a previous Senate passes, including this provision. So, this trick is rather lame as these things go.

But, Harry Reid, et al., deserve to be slapped down for even trying such a thing, and they don't slap 'em down much better than our Sarah. Here is one salient point she makes:

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

Read it all here.