AFP: Take Action! Tell your Senators to Stop Socialized Health Care

Take Action! (Americans for Prosperity)

We told you about efforts to jam a cap-and-trade energy tax through the Senate using reconciliation, a trick to avoid proper debate and the normal 60 vote requirement for important legislation, and you sprung into action, generating a flood of calls and emails to the Senate and IT WORKED. WE WON that fight and kept cap-and-trade out of reconciliation.

Last week, Sen. Johanns introduced a budget amendment to prohibit the use of reconciliation for cap-and-trade, and it passed on a solid 67-31 vote. Every Republican supported the amendment, as did 26 Democrats. Before the Johanns amendment passed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated he wanted to do both cap-and-trade and health care under reconciliation, saying that cap-and-trade revenues would be "exactly how much we need for the first phase of health care reform."

Unfortunately, THERE IS NO TIME TO CELEBRATE, because now Democrats are poised to pull the reconciliation trick for their plan to NATIONALIZE AND RATION HEALTH CARE.

There are a few senators that are going to be very influential in this fight. If you know anyone in the following states please forward this email to them: Arkansas, Indiana, Montana, Nevada and North Dakota. We need your help to get the word out!

While the Senate passed a budget resolution without reconciliation language, the House budget specifically includes a section authorizing the use of reconciliation for a national health care plan. This is despite the fact that reconciliation is only relevant in the Senate, where it can short-circuit debate and pass legislation with only 50 votes instead of the regular 60.

This is a TRICK to let Senate Democrats claim they passed a budget without reconciliation, only to have it slipped back in during conference committee, when the House and Senate budgets are combined.

Please click here to send a message to your senator OPPOSING HEALTH CARE RECONCILIATION.

The dean of the Senate, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia, has made it crystal clear that this is not what reconciliation is for, saying, "I was one of the authors of the legislation that created the budget 'reconciliation' process in 1974, and I am certain that putting health-care reform and climate change legislation on a freight train through Congress is an outrage that must be resisted."

The stakes are enormous. Two big steps toward government-run health care are already in place with the national health information database and the comparative effectiveness research that were hidden in the stimulus plan. We are now only a few steps away from establishing a national health board that will RATION CARE based on the results of comparative effectiveness research, and a coverage mandate designed to, over time, shift more and more people into a government-run and government-controlled health care plan.

Moving health care nationalization through reconciliation will SILENCE moderate Democrats and Republicans and produce the most aggressive, big-government health care plan possible. Any government plan to restructure one sixth of our economy deserves to be debated fully under the regular rules of the Senate.

Please click here to send a message to your senator OPPOSING HEALTH CARE RECONCILIATION.