GOP Shoe Does Not Fit Anymore

If the Republicans win the current debate to decide whether or not America will begin the process of reforming health care costs, coverage and delivery, every one of us will lose.

And we will lose something far more precious than rejection of one major reform initiative. We will have handed control of our government to one very influential special interest group: the health insurance companies. The NRA will be proud of their success.

President Truman urged the Congress to pass legislation covering all Americans with basic health care. That was 60 years ago. In 1972, the first speech I wrote for a U.S. Senator focused on the need for health care reform. That was 37 years ago. In 1993, President Bill Clinton urged Congress to move forward finally on health care reform, and again, the insurance industry rejected it flatly. Each time they succeeded by buying the votes they needed to gain total loyalty from a minority that could be counted on to defeat any and all efforts to move forward on the issue.

And now, Republicans stand on the threshold of defeating the current health care reform legislation supported by President Obama and a majority of the Congress. In addition to serving the interest of the insurance companies, the GOP opposition will hand a major defeat to President Obama ...and they live for that.

Why not use the reconciliation process to circumvent the opposition? That’s the question I am asked often. It might be done. Remember, only items in the bill that affect budget numbers – spending issues or tax revenues can be considered in reconciliation but that would include much of the bill. Excluded would be all of the oversight and regulatory provisions in the current bill.

Remember this: It was the Republicans who set up this process of passing legislation through reconciliation without the risk of a filibuster. And now that they are in the minority, they rue the day they thought of this mischief.

Until 1996, reconciliation was limited solely to deficit reduction, but that year the Republican majority adopted a precedent to apply reconciliation to any legislation affecting the budget, even legislation that would increase the deficit.

Under Bush 43, Congress used reconciliation to enact three major tax cuts. Efforts to use reconciliation to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling failed. That’s right – oil drilling! Thankfully, the idea did not pass.

They were in the majority and they were dedicated to perverting the reconciliation process to pass any and all bills they wanted. So much for the Senate rules. So much for respecting the views of the minority.

And they paid no heed to the warnings that the day would come when the Democrats would be kin the majority and use they same rule against them. Now they have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to say the Democrats should not use the reconciliation process to pass one of the most important bills of our time.

Make no mistake: They represent the insurance companies; they do not represent the interest of their constituents. Is this the form of government the “tea baggers” support? Maybe they don’t understand a representative democracy as defined by our Constitution. (Maybe they ought to read the Constitution.)

What is it with Republicans?

Every Republican walking down the street these days has two phrases you hear repeatedly: “Obama is going to raise your taxes.” The second phrase is: “McCain will cut your taxes.”

So, that’s it? Is it really that simple? Hardly. It is insulting to ask voters to base their vote on such simplistic nonsense, especially since the record of recent Republican presidents demonstrates they are profligate spenders whose borrowing and spending make liberal members of Congress blush.

Look at the record of Ronald Reagan, that great Republican icon. He said he wanted a balanced budget but America didn’t get one until Bill Clinton took office. Reagan never even came close to even thinking about balancing a budget during his 8 years in office. Instead, he tripled the national debt, growing the debt from $1.5 trillion to over $4 trillion by the time he left office.

Today, George Bush makes Reagan look like a piker. Under George Bush, the national debt has soared from $5.8 trillion in 2001 to almost 10 TRILLION DOLLARS today.

Maybe, “my friends” in the Republican Party, you would be willing to raise taxes to pay some of the $406 Billion needed annually to pay the interest on the debt run up on the watch of your Republican Presidents? ( 25% of the notes are held by foreign interests, up from 13% in 1988, so we owe a lot of money to “our friends” overseas who don’t like us one bit.)

Bush holds the record for annual spending and has proposed a budget of $3.01 trillion dollars for fiscal year 2009 which starts October 1, 2008. Barry Goldwater and Everett McKinley Dirksen would not know these guys.

So when somebody says, “Obama is going to raise your taxes,” say to them, “I’d rather pay more taxes to a President who will actually balance the federal government than keep sending the same taxes to someone else who cares only about spending more than he takes in and passing the debt to my kids.”

Incidentally, George Bush finally has submitted a projected balanced budged….for the year 2012!