Michael Steele Calls the Health Care Summit a "Death Panel for the Democrats This Fall"

By Heather Saturday Feb 27, 2010 5:00pm

WTF is Michael Steele talking about here? The Republicans just can't stop themselves from using this sort of eliminationist rhetoric can they? When asked about the Health Care Summit and how he thought it went, Michael Steele throws in some Sarah Palin rhetoric for no good reason I can think of other than some red meat for their base with his prediction for election losses. And of course Steele also doesn't think the President spent enough time listening to the petulant children in the room while they lied and repeated Republican talking points ad nauseum. Steele continues to peddle the lie that if Democrats just adopted more Republican ideas into the health care bill than they did already, Republicans might work with them.

Sorry Michael, but even if the Democrats adopted a bill that was made up of nothing but Republican ideas I think they still would not vote for it. They’ve already proven that by voting against things they championed for in the past and now pretend they didn’t time and time again. The media however continues to let them get away with the hypocrisy. I want to see Steele come on Maddow’s show and try to peddle this same crap. Won’t ever happen since she’d actually call him out for his lies unlike Blitzer.

And honestly as bad as some part of the health care bill are, does Steele honestly think that it's going to be good for Republicans if they do manage to roll it back once and if it becomes law? People thought that Romney care was awful, but it seems the people in Massachusetts are generally happy with it if the polling done on Scott Brown's election is accurate. And I'd just add if they did try to roll parts of it back, it sure as hell would not be the bad parts. These guys have got nothing to offer that helps every day Americans instead of corporations. Nothing.

Transcript via CNN.

BLITZER: Let's get to Michael Steele right now. He's the chairman of the Republican Party. Michael Steele, thanks very much for coming in.

STEELE: Hey, Wolf. Great to be with you, man.

BLITZER: Do you just assume that when all the dust settles in the coming weeks, the Democrats are going to have the up or down vote in the House and the Senate that they need to get healthcare reform passed?

STEELE: I really don't know, right off the top but I would suspect that wherever they are, it's not going to be in a good place. I mean, you had a lot of folks going into yesterday's event, if you will, calling it a dog and pony show for the president and his democrats. Well, I took a slightly different tack on that, a different point of view on it.

For me, just the whole approach of this thing represented more of a death panel for Obama-care. You know, if that wasn't enough, when you come out of this thing and you're looking at the reconciliation fight that may loom ahead of us, it certainly will have represented a death panel for the Democrats this fall.

BLITZER: I'm not exactly following. A death panel. Those were pretty sharp words. What does Michael Steele mean by those words as far as the Democrats and the health care legislation that they wanted enacted?

STEELE: Well, basically what they have done is they've sat in committee now before the nation and effectively by not listens to the American people, by trying to enforce on them a top-down health care system killed any meaningful efforts in my view to get health care done. You saw a president yesterday who interrupted more than he listened. I think that's an important aspect of this to take away from what we saw yesterday. This was a chance for him to sit back as the commander in chief, if you will, of his agenda and listen to both sides and try to find between the talking heads there in the room the common ground, the consensus among the members. Instead, he engaged as if he was a subcommittee chairman trying to beat back efforts by the opposition to get just one more piece of legislation on the table.

BLITZER: He convened the meeting, he was the chairman in effect of that session, right?

STEELE: Yeah, but you can be the chairman of a meeting and still be the one sitting back above the meeting, listening, taking in the points. Gives this is the first time he's engaged the Republicans in any meaningful way. From my perspective, Obama-care hit a wall yesterday and it will be an even bigger wall in my estimation if they go down the road of reconciliation. That's what I mean by a death panel.

BLITZER: It looks like they're going to go down that road one way or another, and Obama-care, as you call it, could be the law of the land pretty soon.

STEELE: I doubt it. The people don't want it. If they go down this road with reconciliation, then come November, there will be a whole new set of lawmakers in the land come to go Washington, because the people will speaking very loud and clear, and then we will begin to undo the damage that has been put in place through Obama-care. It's that simple. This is what the people are wanting out there, and this is what we've been talking about and fighting for. Listen to the people. They're telling you Wolf what they want, man, it's not complicated.

BLITZER: The president made the same point in his summation at the end of that session when he said, you know what? I hope in the next four to six weeks we could get some bipartisan agreement, but he also made it clear he wants 30 million more Americans to have insurance. He says the Republicans are ready to provide 3 million Americans additional insurance -- health insurance over the next ten years. He says on that issue, there doesn't seem to be any way to bridge that gap.

STEELE: But what is in that gap? What is in between 3 million and 30 million? It's money. It's who pays, it's how much. This administration has not adequately addressed that issue. The CBO numbers are all over the place. The impact on small businesses is all over the place. The level of unclarity to what this Obama plan on health care means to me, the small business owner, to me the individual just learned he has cancer, to the individual who's struggling to pay health care costs right now is unclear. So what we've been asking for the president to do, and I applaud leader Boehner and leader McConnell in their efforts to scrap the bill, scrap the bill --

BLITZER: No, the president said he's not going to do that.

STEELE: Let's start with something fresh.

BLITZER: He says he's going forward, and the Democrats are going forward. If they get their 51 votes in the Senate, they just need 50 plus Joe Biden, and Obama-care could be the law of the land pretty soon.

STEELE: It could be, but in the six hours this event went on, we had over 50,000 citizens go to our website, gop.com, and sign a petition, scrap the bill petition, 50,000 Americans in just that six-hour period, saying this is not what we want, you cannot turn a deaf ear to that, you cannot turn a blind out to what people said was a bottom-up solution, and not the bureaucracy and the programs that will come from the various institutions that will be created from it.

BLITZER: The folks will have a chance to decide in November in those midterm elections, dig on what happens in the next several weeks. Michael Steele, always good to have you here in THE SITUATION ROOM.

STEELE: Good to be with you, Wolf.

BLITZER: Michael Steele is the chairman of the Republican Party.