Pushing for universal health care is the family business for Congressman John Dingell of Michigan. During the 1940s, his father, John Dingell Sr., sponsored the Dingell-Wagner-Murray bill, widely considered the first formal proposal for national health insurance. Today the son delivered one of the day's best lines, one that sent a message to skeptics on both the right and the left:
The White House has released some more details about Thursday's Blair House meeting: Who will be there and the shape of the table where they'll all be sitting:
The President will be seated in the middle of one side of the hollow square, with the Vice President, Secretary Sebelius, and congressional Leadership seated alongside him. Members will be seated by caucus around the square.
At around 10:40 a.m., the House erupted into applause as Representative John Dingell of Michigan took the gavel in order to preside over the House of Representatives. Dingell, the longest serving representative in Congress, has been pursuing universal health care since the day he took office in 1955.
I had an unusual thought not long ago while I watched a video clip of a screaming man at a town hall accusing John Dingell of effectively planning the murder of his disabled son. As I watched, the idea struck me that it was legitimately impossible to determine if the man was crazy merely in the political sense-- as in, hoo boy, Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy ideas sure are crazy--or crazy in the more literal sense of a person whose mental health issues render him frequently unable to function. It was a total jump ball which kind of crazy he was.
It is gradually dawning on Washington that cap-and-trade legislation won't pass anytime soon--certainly not this year, and probably not next year either.
The first hundred days of any presidency rarely go off as planned, but, for now, Barack Obama seems to know what's at the top of his to-do list.
"Time is running out, and we need to move forward on this," Senator Barbara Boxer declared in a conference call with reporters last week, referring to global warming. The California Democrat will take over as chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee in January, and she has already vowed to make climate change a top priority, reversing a decade of inaction by congressional Republicans.
