This explains everything:

Dr. Dave Stukus ‏@AllergyKidsDoc

Actual discussion: Parent “I want #Ebola vaccine for my child”

Doc “There isn’t one, but we have #flushot”

Parent “We don’t believe in that”

10:05 AM – 4 Nov 2014

Previously:

GOP goes Ebola crazy (October 18, 2014)

Have some knowledge for (a late) lunch (October 18, 2014)

Sen. Roy Blunt (r): Why have a Surgeon General when you can perpetuate gridlock instead? (October 19, 2014)

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): The only thing we have to fear is… (October 20, 2014)

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): Ebola! (October 27, 2014)

It is instructive to take a look at Roy Blunt’s and Cynthia Davis’ respondes to H1N1 preparedness. Both Blunt and Davis pay allegiance to a similar conservative credo; yet Davis tells the government no thank you, keep your vaccine, while Blunt  puts on a big show, pointing his little finger at the big, bad government that didn’t get him his vaccine right away.

As we pointed out earlier, Blunt has, predictably, remained faithful to the tried-and-true Republican playbook: do nothing, obstruct, defame the opposition, and use the rhetoric of movement conservatism to do so – all suitably fact free, designed to give Blunt the requisite populist sheen.

Davis, however,  responds to the need to head off a potential public health crisis in a way that is true to her belief that government is not entitled to intervene  in health questions (except, of course, when they involve women’s reproductive rights):

It is not the job of the government or the schools to provide vaccines.  Schools are educational institutions, not health institutions. … ultimately this decision should be worked out between you and your doctor.

In Davis’ delusional reality, the recommendations of epidemiologists for disease control can be safely disregarded simply because they might interfere with her narrow definition of the role of government. She conceives of public health policy as a function of doctors interacting with comfortable, middle-class individuals who can afford their services – and if that is not really an effective way to deal with potential epidemics, then let the devil take the hindmost.

With such liars and simpletons for leaders, is it any wonder that the Republican cadres are going into a Tea Party tailspin? The bred-in-the-bone conservative masses are  tasked with understanding why things went south after George Bush led the way to the promised land, gave them their tax cuts, thrilled them with feckless displays of military might, gutted  corporate and financial regulation, and unleashed the free market dogs on a hapless nation. And what tools do they have to help them make sense of what happened? A choice between the mendacity of Republican power politics or the delusional dogma that fed its inevitable failure

*Graffito Angst photograph from Wikipedia Commons.

Randy Turner finds a nice little video of Rep. Roy Blunt, former House Republican Whip and currently running for US Senate, decrying the insertion of a hate crimes measure into the defense appropriations bill currently in the House. (The Senate already passed a similar measure in their version of the appropriations bill 87-7.)

Watch it here:

Blunt makes a rambling speech and stutters through his main claim, which is that never before has the defense authorization bill been used to make the opposition uncomfortable in voting against the attached legislation. It’s true that it’s legislative hardball, but it’s not true that it’s never been done. Within a couple of seconds of Googling, I found an example that Roy Blunt should be aware of, because he was a part of it. Perhaps Blunt received a knock on the head at some point at the start of the year and forgot his entire time in the congressional leadership. That’s one explanation for why he can’t seem to remember anything that he did at the time.

Right before Christmas in 2005, the Republican leadership, which controlled both chambers of Congress and included Roy Blunt, decided that the defense authorization bill was missing something. Sure, it had already passed the House and the Senate AND negotiated through the conference committee that ironed any differences between the two versions, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and then House Majority Whip Roy Blunt came to the conclusion that the vaccine liability bill which had not previously been able to make it through Congress should somehow be quietly put into the defense authorization bill.

A quick general Congressional process primer to make things clearer:  If a bill manages to pass both chambers, it often has different provisions in the House and the Senate versions. But a bill has to pass each chamber with identical language in order to become law. So a conference committee composed of members of each chamber sits down to iron out any differences. Once the bill is suitably altered, it passes the conference committee,and goes back to each chamber in identical form to be voted on by each chamber. After it passes in identical language through the House and the Senate, it goes to the president’s desk for signature or veto.

The vaccine liability bill was a huge boon to Frist’s political donors, which included major pharmaceutical companies. The bill allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who at that time was a major recipient of pharmaceutical donations, to declare an emergency and grant immunity to pharmaceutical companies for any damages faulty vaccines may cause. It’s no wonder it did not pass the Congress under the common practice of voting it through committees and then each chamber.

During conference committee negotiations, Democrats asked if vaccine liability would be in the bill, because that would have been a problem for them. They were told no. But on December 18, 2005, the vaccine liability bill was added to the defense authorization bill at 11:54pm, and the final defense authorization bill was voted through the House at 5:02 the next morning.  It went through the Senate in a similar fashion, and was signed by President Bush on December 30, 2005.

In short, Blunt sat on a team separate from the conference committee that decided to stick a major piece of legislation (with a possible reach far greater than the hate crimes bill) into the defense authorization bill after it had cleared both houses of Congress and the conference committee, with no time for legislators to read the bill or debate the changes. That’s far, far worse than what he’s claiming the Democrats are doing right now.

Note: the citations I found were all behind a paywall. If you’d like to do a Lexis-Nexis search, use “Roy Blunt” “vaccine liability” as search terms and you’ll find what you need.