I'm watching Face the Nation, and current House whip James Clyburn (D-SC) basically dared the Republicans to go ahead and try to repeal health care.
Talking to Host Bob Schieffer, Clyburn mentioned several examples of the type of people who benefit from the historic legislation. Additionally, Clyburn interjected that repeal is a failed tactic that the Republicans have embraced each time the Democrats have passed popular and lasting legislation such as Social Security and the Voting Rights Act.
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SORRY ABOUT THE HIT-AND-RUN Diary, but I thought the subject is so important, that the Democrats are finally pulling a Jean Luc Picard. Translation: They are drawing the line here, with the Affordable Care Act.
Clyburn said, "Let them try to prevent a family who has a child with diabetes from getting insurance. Let them tell a man that has paid his premiums on time for 30 years that his policy is canceled because he just got prostate cancer. Let them tell a woman who has breast cancer, sorry you're policy is cancelled."
Clyburn noted that the Republicans, specifically Strom Thurmond, campaigned in 1966 and 1968 on repealing the Voting Rights Act. How did that work out for them.? Not so well. Ditto for Social Security. Despite calling FDR a socialist, the GOP was never able to gain enough traction to repeal Social Security. The closest they came was 2005 when George W. Bush expended all his political capital in a failed attempt to privatize Social Security. Given what we know about the uncertainties of the stock market, the rebuke was prescient.
The Democrats, led by their whip, are trying to provoke the Republicans into falling into a trap. The only reason they were elected, was because of the economy. They criticized Obama for spending most of the past two years trying to pass HCR, all at the expense of the economy. Moreover, the TeaPublicans also have campaigned — mind you with a straight face — that they will balance the budget and cut spending, and cut taxes. Especially when the ACA reduces the deficit by 140 billion over ten years, says the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
The question is will these GOPocrites spend the next two years trying to repeal something which they don't have the votes for? The passive aggressive and obnoxiously immature tactic of trying to defund various federal agencies will overreach as usual.
The problem the TeaPublicans have forced on themselves is that their entire agenda is stopping President Obama from getting a second term. Their second goal is to dismantle his signature achievement - something that I must remind fellow Democrats that Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton all tried and were not successful.
That might be a great goal for their friends at American Crossroads, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Teaparty Express, but it is going to fuck average Americans big time. People want jobs. That's why they voted for the Republicans. If the jobs don't come, especially if they don't come because these ass-hats spend the next two years pursuing endless investigations, a Quixotic attempt to repeal the ACA, they are going to get shit-canned as fast as they swept into office.
UPDATE: As I said, this was a hit-and-run diary. I forgot to mention how quickly the TeaPublicans will try to shut down the government over the ACA, by using the Bush tax cuts as a hostage. The Republicans think that people will blame the Democrats. I'm betting they won't. Make our day ass-wipes. Good luck with that...
UPDATE II: Rec list! Thank you readers. We must draw the line here! Make it so.
UPDATE III:I think Obama should make full use of Presidential Signing Statements. Bush frustrated both the Democrats and Republicans when he issued thousands of these, essentially saying which provisions he would enforce or not of various laws. The ultra-conservative Roberts Court said nothing about the issue when Bush did it, but should Obama try it, you will hear IOKIYAR arguments against the practice.
UPDATE IV:This comes directly from the Face the Nation website:
Als
o on the program, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., defended the sweeping health care legislation, likening the reform with other major initiatives, like the civil rights laws of the 1960s. "The fact of the matter is what we did with health care is to make that a fundamental right of every citizen."
Clyburn suggested that McConnell and the House Republicans who say they will repeal the bill as soon as they take over the Majority leadership in January reminded him of the South's efforts to repeal landmark civil rights legislation.
"I think that those people who are saying those things are really flying in the face of history," Clyburn said. "The Democrats lost [their] place in the South because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965," Clyburn recalled. "I remember [former Republican Senator] Strom Thurmond going back to Washington after 1968, saying, 'We are going to repeal the Voting Rights Act.'"
And this is how they ran the "dare" quote, (although they only included the first part of it):
"I would like to see which one of those Republicans would propose that we take away a person's family's right to have their child [who's] born with diabetes come off their insurance policies," Clyburn said.