Here's further evidence of the rift in the GOP as it's being played out now in the House of Representatives. For years, the holy grail in health care "reform" for Republicans has been the sham tort reform, scaling back medical malpractice (never mind how
small-scale that effort would be in the grand scheme of the nation's health care costs). For Republicans, malpractice reform has been the favored answer to calls for reform for decades, but that's changed with the
rise of the Tenthers.
Whatever happened to medical malpractice reform? The cause has long been a high priority for Republicans, yet legislation on the issue hasn’t even made it to the floor of a GOP-dominated House in over a year. What gives? [...]
The House GOP’s H.R. 5 medical malpractice reform bill, introduced by Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), was advanced in 2011 soon after they took over the chamber. It sailed through the Energy & Commerce Committee but hit some turbulence during the Judiciary markup in February: namely, Texas Republican Reps. Ted Poe and Louie Gohmert decried it as unconstitutional.
Their gripes were not about the caps themselves, but about Congress’s authority to impose them on states—the same reason Republicans say the health care reform law is unconstitutional.
“I got problems with that,” said Poe. “I think it’s a violation of the Tenth Amendment.”
“The question is: does the federal government have the authority under the Commerce Clause to override state law on liability caps?” Poe explained, according to Politico. “I believe that each individual state should allow the people of that state to decide - not the federal government.”
Gohmert added that he’s “reticent to support Congress imposing its will on the states by dictating new state law in their own state courts.”
One week later, Republicans muscled the bill through the panel by a narrow 18-15 vote — and then indefinitely shelved it.
They have back-up on that from Virginia's extremist Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who called the GOP's tort reform efforts a “one-size-fits-all plan imposed unconstitutionally by the federal government," that he was willing to sue over. So add medical malpractice reform to the long list—federal child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and the Affordable Care Act, for starters—of things the new radical Republican party thinks is unconstitutional. Have fun with that, John Boehner.