CCAGW calls for open, televised process on healthcare negotiations

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) today called upon Congress and the Obama administration to open the doors and allow taxpayers to view all of the proceedings related to negotiations over the healthcare reform bill.

In response to decisions of the Democratic Senate and House leaders to first bypass the conference and reconciliation phase of legislative process and then to hold negotiations on the final version of the healthcare bill behind closed doors, C-SPAN Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Brian Lamb wrote a letter urging an open, televised process. Since then, pressure to open the talks to the public have grown to a fevered pitch.

“‘It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.’”

“The 1971 Woody Allen movie ‘Bananas’ includes a comment that accurately describes this entire process,” added Schatz. “‘It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.’”

“Barring the public from hearing, fully reviewing, and understanding what is being wrought in the healthcare negotiations is manifestly undemocratic and belies the claim that Congress is the greatest deliberative body in the world in the greatest democracy in the world,” said CCAGW President Tom Schatz. “This maneuver invalidates all the lofty rhetoric that was spewed by both President Obama, when he was a candidate, and the House and Senate leadership, who promised to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history. Taxpayers, who have expressed their opposition to this legislation in poll after poll, at hundreds of town hall meetings, in millions of letters and e-mails to their representatives on Capitol Hill have been routinely dismissed, ignored and, now, shut out of the process completely.”

The latest decisions made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev.) follow a pattern that tracked much of the bill’s evolution. In the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Reid crafted the final manager’s amendment behind closed doors with only his staff. The secretive nature of the process reached such ridiculous levels that, at one point, after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took to Senate floor to decry the inscrutability of the process, colleague Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) defended it by saying that even he wasn’t privy to what was being done to the bill.