On the horse trading necessary to pass Obamacare:
We saw Senator Landrieu say, “I decided there were enough significant reforms.” Well, one reform that she really appreciated was a $300 million payoff to her state in the bill that was shoved in there as a way to purchase her vote. So that is a reform she could admire.
The reason I think there continues to be erosion of public support for this [health-care reform] is there is a realization that that is just one of hundreds of provisions, loopholes, payoffs, extra bureaucratic commissions, mandates stuffed into a monstrously large bill that most people don’t even know about.
But there is the sense that we have had ever since the middle of the year that this is not an attempt to streamline our health-care system, which is what it needs. Ours is the best in the world, but it is inefficient. There are a lot of inefficiencies accumulated over decades.
What you want is simplicity, to strip away the inefficiencies. This [bill] will add on to them and it’s going to make it utterly incoherent.
Two examples: tort reform — that would save half a trillion dollars to $2 trillion in a decade — is not in here at all. In fact, in the House bill, it’s discouraged. You lose federal money if you’re a state and you impose tort reform.
Second is the idea of being able to purchase your health insurance across state lines. It’s a ridiculous prohibition. You buy life insurance across state lines. You buy auto insurance. You buy oranges across state lines. If you didn’t, they would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin in the winter.
And the answer isn’t the establishment of a public option in oranges in Wisconsin. It’s allowing [interstate] competition. But the liberals won’t allow [interstate] competition because they want a public option as an avenue into nationalized health care, and the excuse is it [the public option] will introduce competition.
On foreseeing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 defendants will use their trial to denounce American foreign policy:
Well, actually, I did, as did tens of millions of other Americans whose eyes are open. Eric Holder on this is utterly clueless.
And we could see it in the Senate hearings last week in which Senator Graham asked him: Can you give us one case in American history of an enemy combatant captured abroad who was brought to a civil civilian trial in the United States?
Eric Holder answers, “I don’t know. I’ll have to look at that.” He doesn’t know? He’s the attorney general of the United States. And Graham cuts him short, and says: I’ll save you the time. It’s never happened in American history.
This is entirely unprecedented because it makes no sense. Even FDR, a Democratic liberal president, who, when we had the capture of German saboteurs (actually captured on American soil, not even abroad), had them in front of a military court, a secret one. They were executed and the Supreme Court subsequently said it was the right thing to do.
The propaganda here, as we saw in [one of the defendants’] lawyer speaking, is beginning. Holder tried to say that the reason he is doing it in New York — I think he was saying, because he was almost utterly incoherent — was that he could get a conviction in New York in a civilian court.
In fact, the five defendants last year had demanded to plead guilty and be executed in Guantanamo in front of a military tribunal. That would have been obviously a sure thing. It would not have provided the propaganda setting that [KSM] is going to have in New York.
And that’s why all of a sudden the plea has been changed. It will be “not guilty,” and they’re going to say, of course we did it, and here’s why — it was an act of justice. And . . . it’s not just like a scratchy tape [from] Osama that will be on some Arab station. It will be on every station, every network, every television in the entire world. . . .
As Holder himself has said, it will be the trial of the century. And the last trial of the century was O. J. Simpson.