Jim DeMint. Liar.
Would former Sen. Jim DeMint's Heritage Action be so dishonest, so deceptive, and so morally bankrupt as to try and twist real polling that showed just how unpopular defunding Obamacare really is?
Of course.
On Thursday, Heritage Action tweeted out a poster asking if "you" were a part of the 57 percent of Americans who support defunding Obamacare. Not at all coincidentally, Thursday morning, Kaiser Family Foundation released their August tracking poll, which found that, get this, 57 percent of voters are opposed to defunding Obamacare. Cute, huh? Co-opting real news and a valid poll to confuse the issue.
See, a few weeks ago, Heritage Action released a total junk poll "finding" that 57 percent of voters (in 10 very carefully selected GOP congressional districts) supported defunding Obamcare. (The poll was so ridiculous that even The Washington Post's reality-challenged GOP cheerleader Jennifer Rubin trashed it.) Eventually, after sustained pushback, Heritage deleted their initial tweets and tweeted out an altered poster that cited their own poll.
As it turns out, 57 percent is a real number, a real number that totally debunks Heritage's own poll and their whole defunding effort, even while a plurality, 42 percent still have an unfavorable view of the law.
Still, a majority of Americans (57 percent) say they disapprove of the idea of cutting off funding as a way to stop the law from being implemented, a finding that has been consistent in Kaiser Health Tracking Polls since January 2011. Republicans and those with an unfavorable view of the law overall are more likely to approve of attempts to defund the ACA, but even among these groups, about a third (34 percent and 33 percent, respectively) say they disapprove.
The most commonly chosen reason for opposition to defunding the ACA is that “using the budget process to stop a law is not the way our government should work,” (named as a major reason by 69 percent in this group), followed by a belief that “without funding the law will be crippled and won’t work as planned,” (56 percent) and feeling that the law will be “a good thing for the country” (49 percent). Fewer (35 percent) say their main reason for opposing defunding efforts is that they’ve “heard enough about the health care law and it’s time to move on to something else.”
The defunders are fighting a losing battle and enough Republican lawmakers understand that to refuse to go along with the fiasco. So now Jim DeMint and crew are just out-and-out lying to try to convince them the move wouldn't be political suicide. Not that you could expect any better of them.