Health Care Reform - Sheldon Whitehouse (RI-D) to Republicans: There Will Be A Reckoning

Download from Care2 post by: Tracy Viselli


http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ID/217151&start=6427&end=7370

"In a powerful speech from the Senate floor Sunday, Sheldon Whitehouse (RI-D), took his Republican colleagues to task for their "no-holds barred mission of propaganda, obstruction and fear." Whitehouse concluded: "There will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth."

Thanks go to the AmSpecBlog and Robert Stacy McCain for providing a transcription of the speech audio. Here are some key excerpts:

"[Republicans have engaged in] a campaign of falsehood about death panels and cuts to Medicare benefits and benefits for illegal aliens and bureaucrats to be parachuted in between you and your doctor. Our colleagues terrify the public with this parade of imagined horrors. They whip up concerns and anxiety about socialized medicine and careening deficits and then they tell use the public is concerned about the bill."

McCain objects to Whitehouse quoting from Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which the Pulitzer Prize winning historian examines how traditional conservative politics was influenced, to its detriment, by conservative fringe movements like the John Birch Society and McCarthyism in the 1950s. It shouldn't surprise any conservative today that Hofstadter's warnings come to mind in light of recent political events, or that they ignore the historical warnings at their own peril:

"Vindictive passions often arise, [Hofstadter] points out, when an aggrieved minority believes that America has been taken away from them their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. Does that sound familiar . . . in this health debate? . . . [Hofstadter] wrote of the dangers of an aggrieved right-wing minority with the power to create what he called a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible."

Notably, Whitehouse also lambasted Republicans for abusing senate employees--a reference to a Republican delay tactic that forced the Senate clerk to read all 767 pages of an entire single payer amendment on the floor of the Senate until its sponsor, Bernie Sanders, withdrew the amendment:

“We see it in bad behavior. We see it in the long hours of reading by the clerks our Republican colleagues have forced. We see it in Christmases and holidays ruined by the Republicans for our loyal and professional Senate employees. It’s fine for me. It’s fine for the president. We signed up for the his job, but why ruin it for all the employees condemned by the Republicans to be here?”

Whitehouse concluded his speech this way:

“Our colleagues are behaving in this way – unprecedented, malignant and vindictive – because they are desperate to avoid that day of judgment, frantic and desperate now and willing to strange and unprecedented things, willing to do anything, even throw our troops at war in the way of that day of reckoning. If they can cause this bill to fail, the truth will never stand up as a living reproach to the lies that have been told. . . . But when the bill passes and this program actually comes to life . . . there will come a day of judgment, and our Republican friends know that. That, Mr. President, is why they are terrified.”

If conservatives keep missing the point, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Visit this link to see the full CSPAN video of Sheldon Whitehouse's speech. It begins at minute 107 (use the sliders to begin the video there)."