I know you're not going to listen to me.
I'm going to say it anyway, because as a concerned citizen of The United States of America, I must.
Karl Denninger at market-ticker.org tries to offer a well-thought-out cautionary word to Congress in general, and to Nancy Pelosi in particular. For my own thoughts, I will add this much: If you, as a member of Congress, believe a measure to be so unpopular or so poorly crafted that you don't want to go on the record as having voted for it, then either grow a spine and vote against it, or get out of office. It really is exactly that simple. You were elected to serve your constituents' interests and wishes — not to conspire to cram legislation that they're furious about down their throats, then look innocent and try to pretend you had nothing to do with it.
See also the Wall Street Journal's discussion of the "deem and pass" on the healthcare bill here.
As Stanford law professor Michael McConnell pointed out in these pages yesterday, "The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form." If Congress can now decide that the House can vote for one bill and the Senate can vote for another, and the final result can be some arbitrary hybrid, then we have abandoned one of Madison's core checks and balances.
It should be noted that a major part of the significance of this maneuver is that this subterfuge allows the House to pass the healthcare bill on a 50%+1 vote (218 votes by my math, if there are no abstentions, though CNN says 216) rather than the 60% (261 votes) legally required of the House to pass major legislation. Not only can Nancy Pelosi not muster those additional 43 votes, apparently the House is currently 12 votes short of even the 50%+1 required to accomplish "deem and pass", even after Dennis Kucinich switched sides to support the bill this morning at the urging of President Obama.
And in related news, C-Span has put their entire 23-year archive online.
( Full text of the above referenced post, with comments, behind the cut )