By Mr. Curmudgeon
If you think the battle over ObamaCare is over, think again. Last weekend, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she intends to pass the behemoth health care plan using House parliamentary procedures over the objections of a majority of Americans. That doing so endangers Democrats standing for reelection, doesn’t bother her in the least. “We’re not here just to self perpetuate our service in Congress,” Pelosi said of politically vulnerable Democrats. “They know that this will take courage. It took courage to pass Social Security. It took courage to pass Medicare.” She makes a valid point. The very government programs that now teeter on the verge of bankruptcy were unpopular with Americans when lawmakers first debated the measures in Congress years ago. But like the schoolyard drug pusher, Pelosi knows once the customer is hooked, they learn to love their addiction and will pay any price to maintain it.
Pelosi has proven political pundits wrong. Many assumed that when President Obama moved into the White House, corrupt Chicago-style politics would follow in his wake. Instead, the colorful lunatic fringe of Pelosi’s San Francisco Bay Area has become the nation’s political center of gravity.
Representing a hard-left district, Pelosi knows that by thwarting the will of a majority of Americans, she has little to fear from her like-minded constituents. Pelosi also knows her so-called Republican opposition. As columnist Mark Steyn noted in a blog post on nationalreview.com:
“The Dems will be punished; the Republicans will take over the committee chairmanships and be content, as they often are, to be in office rather than in power; and after a brief time out the Democrats will return to find their new statist behemoth still in place. From their point of view, it makes perfect sense.
“The question is: What are Republicans willing to do about it?”
That’s a great question.
That even one Republican showed up to Obama’s Blair House health care summit was a bad sign. Democratic pushers asked Republicans to get onboard by lacing the ObamaCare narcotic with their own ingredients. The Republican argument, so far, is not against the idea of nationalized health care, just the best way to achieve it. The mantra from Republicans is “let’s start health care reform from scratch.” Not “let’s scratch health care reform forever.” Democrats may be tone deaf to public outrage over ObamaCare, but Republicans seem utterly clueless.
After the 2010-midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi may be relegated to the backbenches of Congress, but she’s okay with that. History tells her that when Democrats are out of power, Republicans make good nanny-state caretakers.
On ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said, “Washington will be consumed with the Democrats trying to jam this through in a very messy procedure…and then for the rest of the year, we're going to be involved in a campaign to repeal it. And every Democratic candidate in the country is going to be defined by this unpopular health care bill at a time when the real issues are jobs, terror and debt.” As of today, Alexander is the only Republican to publicly mention the idea of repealing ObamaCare if passed. That leaves just 218 of his fellow House and Senate nanny-state Republicans to gather their wits and develop a spine.
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