March 15, 2010

From the desk of Bob Keefe
Washington, D.C.
March 1, 2010

Political Update

The time has come, at long last. We are about to have the final action on President Barack Obama’s health care initiative. The legislative engineering gears are churning on both sides of the Capital getting ready to process the bills ready for the Members to vote on at last.

Under the torturous procedure that is required to bring about votes on the matter, we expect that the House of Representatives will vote Saturday or Sunday on the bill that passed the Senate last Christmas Eve in the exact form that it passed. That bill then will be engrossed and sent to the President for his signature. Once signed, the bill becomes law… but wait, this is just the first act. Reconciliation requires more stagecraft.

The House will then take up a bill to amend the bill it just passed to make perfecting changes and make it more acceptable to the Members of the House. When that bill is passed, it moves to the Senate for action. In normal times, it would be placed on the Calendar and require a super majority (60 votes) to get to a vote. But this will be Reconciliation and it will be available for unlimited amendment and a final vote, all by simple (51 vote) majority.

The Republicans have announced that it will continue to work to defeat the health care initiative. They plan to file many amendments to tie up the Senate and defeat the bill.

By now, the Health Care bill has become a hurdle that the President is required to jump to establish his primacy in this government. It has become the make or break moment for him.

Meanwhile, our Wars Continue

Lest we forget, Americans keep dying and keep being injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. The official count as of March 1, 2010, of the dead since our involvement in Iraq began on March 23, 2003 is 4,383; the dead from the war in Afghanistan from its beginning in September 2001 is 1,020. The count of American service personnel wounded in Iraq is now 31,626; in Afghanistan 9,496 according to the Department of Defense.

I am afraid that war has become a permanent and usual condition of American life – one that directly impacts only a small segment of the population. The fifteen thousand dead and 50,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past ten years is an enormous number, but still few among the general population. It speaks to the fact that the burden of our protracted wars falls on a relatively small number of Americans… and it falls on them very harshly.

Even, within the military, the burden is not disbursed. As the wars wear on, the forces redeploy and redeploy. One third of those recently killed in Afghanistan had served previously in Iraq. It isn’t fair, is it? Nor is it moral to allow such a small percentage of our population bear this enormous burden so that the rest of us can enjoy the fruits of freedom they are protecting.

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Robert J. Keefe
TKC International, Inc.
1776 I Street, NW, Suite 900 – Washington, D. C. 20006
Telephone: 202 255-8161 – E mail: rkeefe@tkci.com
Past issues of Political Update available at www.bobkeefedc.com