Democrats desperate to pass bad bills

IBD Editorial:

Despite the whipping they took in Tuesday's election, congressional Democrats are moving fast on cap-and-trade and health care. Are they politically tone-deaf, or is this some kind of desperate strategy?

Our guess is that Democratic leaders, having gotten a very negative message from the off-year balloting, are moving as fast as they can to pass the main big-spending items on their unpopular agenda. If they don't act now, the know their radical agenda is dead.

On Thursday, Senate Democrats hustled the cap-and-trade bill out of committee without so much as a hello-and-howdy to the Republicans — knowing full well the GOPers would oppose it.

All this haste, even though global participants in the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks planned for December agree that any CO2-cutting deal is probably a year away.

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in the House want a Saturday showdown for their $1.2 trillion health care takeover after trumpeting support from the AARP and American Medical Association.

As the publication The Hill noted, Democratic leaders are still scrambling to "placate party factions threatening to defeat the health care bill over hot-button issues such as spending, immigration and abortion." They need 218 votes in the House, and they don't seem to have them.

What's the big hurry for a bill that won't even go into effect until 2013? And why act with such haste to move the cap-and-trade bill out of committee? The only obvious answer is Democratic leaders are running scared. Yet there's an element of self-delusion to their strategy.

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They already know that people don't want this legislation and do they think that passing it is going to make them want it? What passing the legislation will do is further energize the opposition where the passion is already running high. By pushing this stuff that people do not want they seem to have a legislative death wish.