Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

The Hill notices that the SEIU is saying one thing

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is lobbying hard against the amendment offered by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to repeal the healthcare reform law.

SEIU has sent e-mails to Senate offices urging lawmakers to vote against the proposal to unwind President Obama’s signature domestic initiative.

Their lobbying has proved effective:

every last Democrat voted no (Lieberman and Mark Warner missed the roll), which is a credit either to Reid and Durbin in keeping the caucus together or to the nutroots in intimidating vulnerable Dems with the prospect of primary challenges in 2012. For cripes sake, even Ben Nelson voted against it.

Meanwhile as they preserve the law for us for themselves it’s another story

SEIU’s outspoken defense of the law has prompted charges of hypocrisy from Republicans, given that some of the union’s chapters have sought waivers exempting them from a key provision of the law requiring the phaseout of health plans with low caps on annual benefits.

Michelle Malkin has been all over this

And the Service Employees International Union, which poured $60 million into Democrat/Obama coffers in 2008 and millions more into the Astroturf campaign for the federal health care takeover, added four new affiliates to the waiver list:

– SEIU Local 2000 Health and Welfare Fund, representing 161 enrollees
– SEIU 32BJ North Health Benefit Fund, representing 7,020 enrollees
– SEIU Local 300, Civil Service Forum Employees Welfare Fund, representing 2,000 enrollees
– SEIU Health & Welfare Fund representing 1,620

That’s in addition to three other previous SEIU waiver winners: Local 25 SEIU in Chicago with 31,000 enrollees; Local 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund with 4,544 enrollees; and SEIU Local 1 Cleveland Welfare Fund with 520 enrollees — which brings the total number of Obamacare-promoting SEIU Obamacare refugees to an estimated 45,000 workers represented by seven SEIU locals.

And a fuller list listing all the other unions, is available here with the following note:

It is worth noting that there are 166 union benefits funds now exempted from this requirement, which account for about 40 percent of the exempted workers. This means that although there are only 14.6 million unionized employees in the United States, and 860,000 of them are already exempted from this provision of Obamacare.

Unions are huge democratic contributes, anyone who think this is a coincidence is fooling themselves

Reid BTW was very smart to get this vote over with ASAP, but I’m REALLY surprised that he didn’t give any of his folks cover. Either he figured it was early enough or that because of the first vote it wouldn’t have made a difference.

The Media will want to move away from this ASAP but the GOP will keep this vote in front of the faces for quite a while and if the opinion of the people I talk to door to door has any weight, it will be crushing come 2012.

Update: Hot air notices

The Obama administration seems very eager to impose regulation on everyone except their bestest buddies. If these policies are so bad that Obama’s friends and political allies need waivers to get around them, then perhaps they shouldn’t be in place at all. And perhaps the Obama administration should learn something about the rule of law, rather than the rule of whim — or as the rest of us call it, The Chicago Way.

Yup.