| The idea of Ted Kennedy, Sal DiMasi, and Robert Travaglini, among others, standing behind "Governor" Mitt Romney as he signs the health care bill at Faneuil Hall makes me positively ill. And it should make them ill as well. Romney has already spit in their faces once by publishing an op-ed yesterday - on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, no less - promising to veto the modest fee the bill imposes on non-participating employers, and apparently taking a dig at the Medicaid expansion as well, without so much as a heads-up to the Democrats who actually wrote this bill. Why on God's green earth would these Democrats return the favor by saying, in effect, "please sir, may I have another?"
Everyone knows why Romney is doing what he's doing. Don't let him get away with it. Boycott the signing ceremony. Have a nice big celebration on the day you override his veto - that will be the day that this bill really goes into effect, not today.
JUST DON'T GO.
UPDATE: Check out today's outstanding editorial in the Herald. Money quote:
The fact is, of course, that civic leaders like Peter Meade of Blue Cross and Jack Connors, chairman of the Partners board, had a helluva lot more to do with passage of the health-care bill by breaking the legislative logjam than Romney ever did. But since neither is running for office they haven’t scheduled any press interviews on the subject....
And [Newsweek's Jonathan] Alter notes Romney has “been skillful at negotiating cultural issues like gay marriage and stem-cell research.� If by “negotiating� Alter means managing to come up with the most intellectually untenable posture on stem-cell research imaginable (he favors using leftover embryos from in-vitro clinics, but not therapeutic cloning) and on gay marriage favoring first a constitutional amendment that paired a ban on gay marriage with approval of civil unions and then opposing that to favor an outright ban - well, then he’s a damned good “negotiator.�
And as for negotiating with the Legislature on issues like stem-cell research, well, the Democratic leadership has pretty much ignored him, doing what they please.
Read the rest. They really nail it. The Globe has an editorial on the same subject, but it's much less fun to read - it just says that Romney shouldn't do what he is obviously going to do. |
