Thread: GOP House Leaders Move Budget Resolution Forward- Calling Obamacare a “train wreck,”

Exclusive: Rand Paul Fires Back at AP, Says He'll Continue to Fight ObamaCare Funding



by Matthew Boyle 21 Sep 2013, 6:27 PM PDT 57 post a comment

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News on Saturday evening that an Associated Press report that claimed he said that Americans “probably can’t get rid of Obamacare” is inaccurate.

“I’ve been saying the same thing I’ve been saying all along,” Paul said. “I didn’t say anything different today than I haven’t already been saying. It’s kind of interesting that people create it to be news but I’ve said all along and continue to say that I won’t vote to fund Obamacare. I don’t think we should fund Obamacare.”

The AP’s Thomas Beaumont wrote on Saturday that Paul said Obamacare “probably can't be defeated or gotten rid of. And he's suggesting there is little he and other congressional Republicans can do to stop the law from taking effect. Speaking to reporters Saturday at a gathering of Michigan Republicans, Paul says Republicans could use votes on measures in the House and in the Senate to come up with compromise legislation. But the Kentucky Republican says that time for that is running out.”

“An opponent of the law many call ‘Obamacare,’ Paul says he's acknowledging that, in his words, ‘we probably can't defeat or get rid of Obamacare,’” Beaumont continued. “He says that working from the position of not funding the health care law might help render it, quote, ‘less bad.’”

In Beaumont’s three paragraph article, he did not include even one full sentence of a quote from Sen. Paul. So Breitbart News reached out to Paul to clarify, and Paul argued that he absolutely thinks a good solution can be reached as a result of this fight to defund Obamacare.

“What exactly happens?,” Paul said in his phone interview with Breitbart News, “I mean no one knows, but I think everyone expects that the Republican House was going to defund it, which has occurred. And the Democrats in the Senate are going to vote to fund it. I’m going to vote to defund it.”

Paul said he thinks the key is that the House did its job, and now Senate Republicans need to fight to get to that point.

“I still support the effort and I’ll still vote to defund Obamacare.”
Paul added in an email after the interview that he “will not vote for any CR [continuing resolution] that funds Obamacare,” and that “if there is one penny for Obamacare I will vote 'no.'”

As for an outcome of what will happen in terms of which “impasse” he said the House and Senate will end up at, he said he does not know. “I can’t tell you the outcome but I can tell you A or B,” meaning that either there is a filibuster of the House bill to prevent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from stripping Obamacare defunding language from the House CR, or the Senate succeeds in stripping the defund language and the House holds strong by going to a conference and negotiating further takedowns of Obamacare.

“It isn’t my job to guess how this ends,” Paul said in the email, adding that his job is to fight against Obamacare.

“It is my job to stand up against Obamacare,” Paul said.

In his phone interview with Breitbart News, Paul said that red state Democrats up for re-election next year might break and vote with Republicans to defund Obamacare, but “not on a cloture motion.”

“The Democrats stay pretty solid on a cloture motion,” Paul said. “It will be an indirect vote and they’ll weather the storm. If cloture is invoked and there is a vote on stripping out the defund parts of the House bill that some of us favor, three or four Democrats will get a pass. There would be a 51-vote margin, and they [red state Democrats] may well vote that way [in favor of defunding Obamacare]. I don’t know. Most of them have been supportive of Obamacare all along, but they might think it would help their election to vote otherwise. But anyway, I haven’t really changed my position. My position has stayed always the same. I’m going to vote to defund Obamacare and I think that’s the best thing for the country.”

On plans from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that he might filibuster the House bill to prevent Reid from stripping the Obamacare defunding language from it, Paul said:

You can filibuster the bill, and I will support not ending debate on it. Although it is a little bit of an unusual vote in the sense that you’d be filibustering a bill that you support. But you have to do that, in order to never go on the bill. That’s an impasse. But you’re also at an impasse if the Senate simply passes a Senate version and the House has a version. Then you’re still at an impasse. So I’m not sure if you’re at a different impasse if you’re successful in filibustering the bill, it’s just another form of impasse. I don’t know exactly what the difference is, necessarily, between a filibuster and the Democrats passing a version and having a Republican-passed version. I know of no way once you get past cloture of forcing a 60-vote margin on the motion to strike language. So if they move to strike the defund language, I’m pretty sure the parliamentarian will say that’s a 51-vote margin.


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Media Decry GOP's Fighting Spirit

By GOPUSA Staff September 23, 2013 12:22 pm

The Republican Party is at a crossroads, not only on Benghazi, but on Obamacare. Does the GOP have the will to fight? The media are stirring with unease at the thought that Republican congressional leaders will finally and forcefully confront Obama about his scandalous foreign and domestic policies.
The decision has been made by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), in response to internal pressure, to fight to defund Obamacare. Will he also permit the conservatives to investigate the truth about Benghazi?
AIM’s September 16th conference on Benghazi came under a frenetic attack from Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, who fears that pressure on Boehner will force him to agree to a Watergate-style committee investigating the Benghazi terrorist attack and cover-up. Such a probe, greatly feared by Obama and his allies, could finally get to the bottom of the scandal involving arms smuggling to terrorists in the Middle East and the deaths of four Americans. Rep. Frank Wolf’s (R-VA) H. Res. 36, to establish such a committee, has 176 co-sponsors. This is a strong majority of the Republican majority in the House. Yet, Boehner has so far refused to authorize the special committee.
Until recently, Speaker Boehner had no plans to use the budget battle to defund Obamacare. But pressure from within, from Tea Party and conservative Republicans, has forced him to act. The move is being distorted and twisted by the media, citing people like Karl Rove and Senator John McCain (R-AZ), into an effort that will only succeed in closing the government down and giving Obama a political victory of some kind. This is an argument, of course, for business as usual in Washington, another victory for Obama and the Democrats that will leave conservatives dispirited and demoralized.
The media know that the health care law is unpopular and that the Republicans have a winning issue in their fight to repeal it. Obama has delayed implementation of key aspects of the law because it was poorly conceived and rushed through without adequate review. Defunding the law is the only legislative mechanism available to House Republicans to save the American people from this unfolding disaster. The House has the power of the purse, and the media know it.
That is why the media enthusiastically quote “experts” such as Rove in order to try to derail the push to defund the law. CNN’s Gloria Borger argued, “… even Karl Rove in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today said look, Republicans are essentially on a fool’s errand here.”
In the end, Senate Democrats will protect Obama and his law. But is that a reason not to engage in a public fight to defund it?
Rove had argued that “…any strategy to repeal, delay or replace the law must have a credible chance of succeeding or affecting broad public opinion positively.”
Yet, through his column and numerous media appearances, especially on Fox News, he undermines those trying to influence public opinion in the right direction.
In a column, before GOP leaders in the House decided to change tactics and use the budget battle to defund Obamacare, Erick Erickson of RedState had warned that the Republican establishment and its conservative base were moving far apart. “If the GOP does not make a stand against Obamacare, they will not see the energy they need to effectively compete in 2014,” he said.
The Republican establishment in the House finally got the message on Obamacare.
When Boehner caved in, Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express, the nation’s largest Tea Party political action committee, said the voice of the grass roots “was too loud for the House leadership to ignore.”
What’s missing from the coverage is an examination of the record of Republicans such as Rove and McCain, and whether their political “expertise” is worthwhile. Rove spent $300 million in 2012 to try to elect Mitt Romney and guarantee a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate. He failed.
In order to make the case that Republican efforts to defund Obamacare are “self-defeating,” Rove cites a poll purporting to show that such a move would turn off independent voters. But polls haven’t been kind to Rove and other “experts” who had used them to predict a Romney victory in the 2012 presidential election. Rove’s controversial record and predictions were a factor in his being dropped as an analyst by Fox News after the election, before being inexplicably rehired.
Since his failure as the Republican nominee for president against Obama in 2008, McCain has emerged as one of the biggest supporters of Obama’s pro-Muslim Brotherhood policy in the Middle East. Most Egyptians welcomed the overthrow of the Obama-backed Muslim Brotherhood regime in their country. But McCain went to Egypt on Obama’s behalf to argue for the return of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in some fashion.
McCain has been in the news lately as a proponent of arming the Syrian “rebels,” many of them identified as connected with al Qaeda. To promote this policy, he quoted a Wall Street Journal writer, Elizabeth O’Bagy, who had claimed a non-existent Ph.D. She has been fired not only by the Institute for the Study of War, where she worked, but by a Syrian rebel group she had been serving as “political director.”
However, I have not seen Senator McCain being questioned by anyone in the media about his reliance on this fake scholar. McCain always remains a media favorite, no matter how ridiculous he looks.
Having deferred to conservatives on Obamacare, Speaker Boehner and other members of the Republican establishment are now feeling the heat over Benghazi. AIM’s conference to launch the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi captured much of the unrest over Boehner’s curious failure to create a Watergate-style committee to investigate the scandal. Speakers said that the scandal could implicate the President in illegal operations that are international in scope.
Special Operations Speaks launched a billboard campaign to pressure Boehner to create the special committee, while Revive America USA has been running “Fire the Speaker” ads over his resistance to the idea. Those ads have run on Fox News, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Mark Levin radio show.
The ads say:
“Speaker Boehner promised he’d repeal Obamacare, but now refuses to even defund it!
He surrendered to Obama’s higher taxes and spending, and when House Republicans complained, Boehner punished them. Speaker Boehner won’t allow a special ‘Watergate’ committee to investigate the 9/11-Benghazi terror attack, even though a majority of House Republicans demand it! After 3 years of broken promises and secret back-room deals with Obama—You’re Fired, Speaker Boehner!”
Boehner has caved on Obamacare. Will he do so on Benghazi?
In the Senate, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked for unanimous consent for passage of his Senate Resolution 225 to create a special committee in that body to investigate Benghazi, but liberal Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer (CA) objected, thereby defeating the idea.
“Given the yearlong collective failure of our government either to gain clarity on what happened in Benghazi or extract any retribution for the terrorist attack,” Cruz said, “Congress should form a Joint Select Committee to launch a proper investigation.”
Despite the clear case for such a committee, Cruz has only 23 co-sponsors. McCain and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) are not among them.
Despite what the Republicans may think or do, of course, the Senate is run by Democrats like Boxer, and they will never agree to a special committee to investigate the Obama policies that resulted in Benghazi. The House is a different matter.
Bob Adams of Revive America says Boehner is under tremendous pressure to authorize the special committee on Benghazi, or get out of the way and let the conservatives do the job. The argument that the Senate won’t agree with the House doesn’t apply in this case, since House Republicans can set up this special committee on their own.
The future of Boehner’s speakership, the Republican Party, and even Obama’s presidency may hang in the balance.
---
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/201...rit/?current=1

The First Four Obamacare Train Wrecks, With Many More to Come

Posted by Jimmy Z on September 24, 2013 at 11:06am in General, Town Hall

(Jim Geraghty, National Review Morning Jolt)

Look, Democrats. You fouled up on Obamacare. You fouled up big time, and time is running out to mitigate the damage. You said you had to pass the bill in order to see what's in it. Apparently, it was like the Ark of the Covenant.

Yes, this is a train wreck. It's a train wreck upon another train wreck, upon another train wreck . . . it's train wrecks all the way down.

First: For starters, it's a fragmentation grenade to the full-time job market. CNBC:

With open enrollment for Obamacare about to begin, small- and medium-sized businesses are not hiring because of uncertainty surrounding the implementation of the law, the CEO of nation's fifth-largest staffing company said on Monday.
"Companies are really not interested in hiring full-time people. That's really the issue with Obamacare," Express Employment Professionals boss Bob Funk told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday.
Funk, a former chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, admitted that this trend is a "boon" for his business, but "not healthy for the country as a whole."

Second, the Wall Street Journal reports that the software doesn't work. These geniuses have spent oodles of taxpayer money encouraging people to sign up for the exchanges, only to find out the software to run the exchanges isn't working:

Less than two weeks before the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the federal health overhaul, the government's software can't reliably determine how much people need to pay for coverage, according to insurance executives and people familiar with the program.
Government officials and insurers were scrambling to iron out the pricing quirks quickly, according to the people, to avoid alienating the initial wave of consumers.
A failure by consumers to sign up online in the hotly anticipated early days of the "exchanges" is worrisome to insurers, which are counting on enrollees for growth, and to the Obama administration, which made the exchanges a centerpiece of its sweeping health-care legislation.
If not resolved by the Oct. 1 launch date, the problems could affect consumers in 36 states where the federal government is running all or part of the exchanges. About 32 million uninsured people live in those states, but only a fraction of them are expected to sign up in the next year.

Third, it botched coverage for working families. USA Today:

A so-called "family glitch" in the 2010 health care law threatens to cost some families thousands of dollars in health insurance costs and leave up to 500,000 children without coverage, insurance and health care analysts say.
That's unless Congress fixes the problem, which seems unlikely given the House's latest move Friday to strip funding from the law, which is also called the Affordable Care Act.
Congress defined "affordable" as 9.5% or less of an employee's wages, mostly to make sure people did not leave their workplace plans for subsidized coverage through the exchanges. But the "error" was that it only applies to the employee — and not his or her family. So, if an employer offers a woman affordable insurance, but doesn't provide it for her family, they cannot get subsidized help through the state health exchanges.
That can make a huge difference; the Kaiser Family Foundation said an average plan for an individual is about $5,600, but it goes up to $15,700 for families. Most employers help out with those costs, but not all.

Fourth, Obamacare is so poorly-constructed, it manages to louse up coverage and payments for the working-class employees who actually have good plans and care right now. President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Kathleen Sebelius managed to be so astonishingly incompetent in designing, building, and implementing this program, they've managed to screw over their most stalwart allies. From the Center for Public Integrity:

Many union workers are in health plans with solid benefits and relatively low copayments and coinsurance obligations. Democrats drafting the law bought the insurance-industry's argument that Americans need to have more "skin in the game," meaning they should pay more for care out of their own pockets even if they're insured.
I've talked to union members who have not had a raise in years because of rising health care costs. They've been willing to forego wage increases at the bargaining table in exchange for keeping decent health insurance.
Obamacare provides employers with a disincentive to continue to offer health plans that exceed a certain value. Such plans will be subject to a premium tax . . . Another unintended consequence of the law will mean that many other union workers — especially those in the building trades — will have to pay more for coverage than they do now.

I'll give you a moment to chuckle at Obama-backing union members finding their health coverage is now all loused up, but it goes to illustrate just how badly this legislative and regulatory monstrosity is going to hit everyone -- even the folks it would be most expected to help.
Now, if a plan is so bad that it hurts so many of the Americans it's supposed to help . . . why are we implementing it?


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