GOP Bullshit: Colloquies with your own party are stupid

While the vote that the Senate will be taking some time this week (hopefully) is merely on a few fixes that everyone wants to see take place, anyone watching the proceedings would think that the whole big Health Insurance bill were still on the docket. It is not! It has been signed into law by President Obama and any further delay on the reconciliation fix is merely keeping in place elements of HR 3590 that everyone is opposed to.

Anyone watching C-SPAN 2 today got to see what may as well have been a replay of the "debates" that were aired back in December. In these sessions a couple of GOP Senators stand around and engage in a "colloquy" so that they can dramatically ask and answer each other's questions related to the Health Insurance law. It's slightly entertaining because of the way that the GOP Senators like Judd Greg of New Hampshire, Tom Coburn (the asshole who made the clerk read aloud Bernie Sanders' 700+ page amendment to stall the vote in December), and John "won't someone tell me I lost" McCain, have been asking each other exceptionally sarcastic questions to make their points.

Judd Greg probably has the best delivery when he asks Mr. Coburn extremely leading questions that imply that anyone helped by the new legislation will not be able to find a doctor, or those with Medicare and Medicaid will have even less access to doctors. Or McCain asking Mr. Greg "but isn't this deficit neutral?" to which Mr. Greg answers "no, it is not. It is a bit of a scam." These are their opinions which go against the CBO scores, and they've all made these positions known before so it's funny how they ask the questions in a tone that suggests they are honestly curious to know the answer and don't know what their colleague is planning to say.

It's really too bad because I could see where a colloquy could be used by members of Congress to have some fair and honest airing of ideas if it took place with members of different parties. If they were asking questions that they actually wanted to hear answers to, rather than just a forum to repeat what they've already been saying, it could be very useful to the country.