On Friday, every Republican Senator sent U.S. Senate Majority Leader Reid a letter which said, where is the bill text?

Here is an excerpt from the letter:

“The American people and every member of Congress should be allowed to read the bill that was sent to CBO. The bill should be made available for taxpayers to read and learn how the federal government is spending their money. We are writing to request that you immediately make all materials sent to CBO publicly available on the internet.”

Senator Reid’s response was — uh, the bill “does not exist.” So, yet another Senate Vapor Bill Rises.

Majority Leader Reid’s letter to every Republican Senator makes clear that:

“Apart from my decision to include a public option from which states may opt out, no final decisions have been made — and none can be made until we get more information about how CBO would score different combinations.”

So, for all work, time, effort and Committee votes and amendments “no final decisions have been made.”

But here is the Vapor bill admission:

“…there is no bill to release publicly — it does not exist.”

We are changing the world of health care as everyone knows it, and we will not show you the bill — not because Reid does not want to, he says he wants to show it to America — but because it “does not exist.”

Slate’s John Dickerson has finally said what has been so glaringly obvious for so many months, but has been ignored, not discussed and generally denied by the MSM and the supporters of ObamaCare with great discipline: the internal divisions inside the Democratic Party over specific policy issues contained inside ObamaCare could cause it to collapse:

“With nearly all Republicans opposed to the president’s plan, the last stages of negotiations will be among Democratic factions. Obama came into office promising to bridge the partisan divide in Washington. But the outcome of the health care debate may depend more on his ability to bridge the divides in his own party.”

This is the “teachable moment” that comes from the vote and failure of the public option in the Senate Finance Committee.

The standard party line among the Democratic leadership — especially the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — has been the missteps, mistakes, chaos and general political failure of ObamaCare is all the Republican’s fault. But even the liberal FireDogLake and DailyKos know this blame-the-Republicans is goat food for the brain dead. The Public Option vote has put the lie to the it’s-the-Republican’s-fault.

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The House is debating HR 1586, a bill that would tax bonuses given to employees of bailed out businesses.  The bill would tax “90 percent of the TARP bonus received by the taxpayer.”  The TARP recipient’s employer must have received the money from “the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008″ (the TARP bailout), “the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation”, “members of the same affiliated group” (units of the TARP recipients, FNMA and FHLM monies), and affiliated partnerships.  Conservatives in the House and Senate need to use this debate as an opportunity to debate how this provision was placed in the Obama so called Stimulus bill and forbidding future bailouts.

This effort in the House and Senate to tax bonuses is not much more than a cover your backside vote to protect the Obama Administration and liberals in Congress who requested, through Treasury, that the AIG Bonus Protection Amendment be put in the Stimulus.  If conservatives in the Congress want to show some leadership, they need to use the bonus debate to fight the further nationalization of private enterprise.

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