Posted on 04/28/2013 9:05:19 AM PDT by Incorrigible
GOP's Toughest Critics Are Inside The Party, Outside The House
by Tamara Keith
This week, the House was set to vote on a bill modifying the president's health care law. It was a Republican bill, supported by the leadership, but it ran into trouble, and it was pulled from the floor before the scheduled vote.
It's an example of the kind of obstacles Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, faces in getting legislation through the House. In a number of recent cases, his problem hasn't been the Democrats as much as members of his own party, backed by proudly conservative outside groups.
The health care bill was supposed to show the softer side of House Republicans. It would have taken money from one part of "Obamacare" and used it to boost coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. And, as an added bonus, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said it would make Democrats look bad for voting against it.
"That's not something I think they can go home and be proud of," he said. "We're trying to find solutions here."
But there was a problem: Conservatives hated the bill.
"We're shifting money from one part of Obamacare we don't support to another part of Obamacare we don't support," said Rep. Justin Amash from Michigan, who was elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, at an event called Conversations with Conservatives. "That's a nonstarter for me."
And it wasn't just a few contrarian Republicans. The outside groups that helped many freshman and sophomores get elected said they would be watching the vote. The Club for Growth issued a "key vote alert" urging a "no" vote, and Heritage Action, the activist offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, made it clear it thought the bill was both bad policy and bad politics.
The leadership came up against a wall of conservatism — and the wall won.
A spokesman for Cantor says he hasn't given up. But this is part of a pattern. On a number of bills in recent months, if these groups urge a no vote, the measure is either pulled from the agenda or it passes only because of Democratic support.
"A lot of these seem to be self-inflicted wounds," says Dan Holler of Heritage Action. "There is this inherent tension between the Republican Party and the conservative principled base. And a lot of that time that tension plays out on the House floor in these sort of bills."
Often that means these conservative groups are working at cross purposes with Boehner and others in leadership. Holler says it doesn't have to be that way — they could be allies, if only the speaker would push conservative policy.
"The proper way to look at that question [is] it's not necessarily what outside groups are doing that's counterproductive to the leadership agenda — it's why the leadership agenda is divorced from what their party wants," Holler says.
Traditionally, if the leadership decides something is a priority and schedules it for a vote, it will get a vote, and it will pass with a majority of the majority. But, with a "key vote alert" calling for a "no" vote from the Club for Growth or Heritage Action, leadership-backed bills are facing challenges.
The speaker's office dismisses their influence, but the Club for Growth's Andy Roth says the House is now loaded with members who agree completely with the club.
"In previous years, there were a lot of moderate and even liberal Republicans in the House, but thankfully their numbers have dwindled and they've been replaced by so-called Tea Party conservatives," he says. "The conservativeness — if that's a word — of the Republican conference has gotten demonstrably higher."
The Club for Growth would like to boost those numbers even more and has a project called Primary My Congressman, aimed at replacing moderates with more conservative members, like Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina.
"Philosophically, we're all aligned — that's why they endorsed me, that's why they helped me get elected," Duncan says. "But right down to the very heart of it, the core, is that I'm conservative, they're a conservative group — we're probably going to land on the same page anyway."
And sometimes, that's a very different page from the speaker of the House and his leadership team.
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
We don’t want to “Fix” parts of Obamacare. We want the thing to go as is, watch it crash and burn and hold the people who passed in accountable.
You are incorrigible! ;-)
The conservatives should tell Boehner that they want to vote to repeal Obamacare every month. All of it, totally! No minor adjustments to make it easier on this or that group. The whole thing is a train wreck (per Dem. Max Baucus) and the Republicans need to be in Obama’s face about it.
Boehner keeps on coming up with these boners, while making out like he’s some kind of genius at political strategy.
Boehner needs to take a new stand, with real results and which Dems are not already in support of.
Something like, for instance:
BRING BACK AMERICAN JOBS.
It wasn’t a “Republican” bill.
It was a Republican Leadership bill.
But to NPR, all Republicans look alike.
Why do ANYTHING to help Mengelecare? The sooner it collapses under its own weight, the better. The more people who get pissed off at it, the better, and the faster they get pissed off at it, the better. It is clearly time to dump this alleged House "leadership". Like, yesterday.
There is one and only one acceptable outcome for 0’care and that is full repeal. Period. No discussion. No endless articles on the nuances from the Atlantic Monthly. Kill it with fire. No patches, fixes, temporary subsidy withholdings, no interim exchange substitutions, no localized administrative delegates, none of that. The bill is absolutely corrupt, was passed by a mere one vote twice, is a forecast disaster and a pack of incredibly expensive lies. It needs to be deracinated.
Screw Cantor. Another prehensile John McCain.
As an aside, I don’t hear anything anymore about the fact that the leftist NPR is partially supported by taxpayer money. Is this just another aspect of the leftist agenda that has come to be a fact of life, just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? Just as we are all forced to support Planned Genocide through our taxes?
The GOP-E wants Obamacare to become yet another leftist fact of life. Even if they don’t explicitly support the leftist agenda, they support Big Government, as that’s the trough from which they all swill. Naturally they will always want the trough to be bigger. Government in contemporary America exists to support and grow itself.
The hell with slapping duct tape on the Titanic. Repeal this POS.
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