House GOP to Obama: No, Thanks.

That seems to be the message Minority Leader John Boehner is sending to Obama regarding the February 25th health care dog-and-pony show (from Beltway Confidential):

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, issued a statement late Saturday in response to President Obama's Friday invite to a bipartisan Health Care Summit at the White House.

Boehner and other Republican leaders are complaining that the event is simply political gamesmanship and that Obama is planning to have a health care deal finalized before anyone even sits down at the meeting, which is scheduled to take place on Feb. 25.

Here's Boehner's statement:

A productive bipartisan discussion should begin with a clean sheet of paper. We now know that instead of starting the 'bipartisan' health care 'summit' on Feb. 25 with a clean sheet of paper, the president and his party intend to arrive with a new bill written behind closed doors exclusively by Democrats -- a backroom deal that will transform one-sixth of our nation's economy and affect every family and small business in America. They will then engage a largely handpicked audience in a televised 'dialogue' according to a script they have largely pre-determined. They will do this as a precursor to embarking on a legislative course that Democratic congressional aides acknowledge has also been pre-determined -- a partisan course that relies on parliamentary tricks to circumvent the will of the American people and engineer a pre-determined outcome. It doesn't sound much like bipartisanship to me.

Unless Obama and the Democrats agree to a completely fresh start on health care - in other words scrapping both the House and Senate bills and starting over - there's no reason for the GOP to show up for this thing and end up as wallpaper for Obama's P.R. stunt.