NOEMIE EMERY: Dead Congress Walking | The Weekly Standard

Dead Congress Walking

The Democrats are afraid of the voters and mad at each other. Their vaunted health care reform is going to do them in.

BY NOEMIE EMERY

March 22, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 26

A stranger moment in politics has seldom been seen. A vast expansion of government that affects every one of the country’s 300-plus million inhabitants may be passed by a hair against fierce and fiercely repeated public opposition by a Congress that no longer speaks for its voters—most of whose members are angry and scared. They are afraid of their voters, and mad at each other, or rather, the Democrats are: The liberals are mad at the centrists, the centrists are mad at the liberals. Democrats in the House are angry at those in the Senate, and deeply suspicious of being betrayed. The centrists are also mad at Obama, for picking the wrong cause (health care and not the economy), doing it in the wrong way (big and expensive, not incremental and smaller), and pushing them to risk their careers in backing a cause and a program neither they nor their constituents want.

via Dead Congress Walking | The Weekly Standard.