With the impending vote looming over so-called health care reform, there is a scramble to bribe any Democrat who still needs bribing. Republicans were written off long ago by the controlling party for being too partisan. But the party that has held the majority in the House and the Senate for the last 15 months is really not so partisan at all or else this would have passed by now. In all that time that they had control of Congress along with a President who seems willing to sign anything that has “Health Care” in the title, we are finally approaching a vote, presumably. Some of this controlling majority party are still undecided as to the bill — or at least holding out for some sort of payola. By various accounts, they either have enough votes to pass the bill or they do not. One interesting idea would be to actually vote and see for sure.

Now we hear that there may not even be a vote at all. Through some interpretation by some nameless entity, it is said that through a certain procedure, Congress can simply “deem” that the bill has passed without the need for a cumbersome vote. Voting can be so unfair sometimes! Plus, if you do vote as a member of Congress, there is a record of what your vote was. You will go down in history forever as the one who voted for or against this bill — or you could simply vote “present” as was the strategy for once-Senator Obama. What is good about “deeming” and not having a record of your vote is that — when things go bad– you can then claim “I was always against this (b)ill from the start!”

As Vice President Biden explained today on ABC news, “You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.” Yet people insist that this is not a Big Government takeover. “The health care system is broken” said President Obama, and he is going to “fix” it. Supporters of this fiasco claim that the only reason that most Americans oppose this noble bill is because they do not understand how wonderful it is — yet they fail to explain how wonderful it is. Instead we see the bribing of public officials on matters unrelated in order to buy their votes with the money of those that oppose the bill in the first place. As Speaker Pelosi says, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy”. Nice strategy. If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he’d be turning over in his grave!

No one really knows what is really being voted on – if it will be voted on at all. Apparently, certain portions can be added and voted on separately or not. The unwashed masses such as I cannot grasp the simple civics that certain last minute revisions can be attached to the bill unless of course they simply adopt the Senate version as-is — along with some amendments – or not, or something. The bill can just be deemed to have passed and we can pretend that it was voted on.Pseudo-intellectuals will argue that this sort of thing goes on all of the time in Washington — with both parties — and they can cite various cases and procedural interpretation with bumper-sticker like sloganism.

But this of course, is the point exactly. There is no place fo such bureacracy in the running of my life. It is true that Big Government Health Care is a bad idea. But good or bad, it is not the role of Big Government to run our lives like they try to do.