Posted on 03/28/2017 4:43:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
According to The New York Times, 10 moderates, 15 conservatives, and eight other Republicans would have voted against the Republican repeal and replace Obamacare bill. So, then, 15 or so conservatives made it impossible to pass the bill favored by nearly every other Republican and by President Donald Trump. If that is the case, what we have here is another conservative example of purism and principle damaging another major opportunity to do good.
The first purist conservative example were the Never-Trumpers, who believed it was better for Hillary Clinton to be elected president and for the Left to have four more years of presidential power than for Donald Trump to win.
There were valid reasons to wonder whether Donald Trump was a conservative, and valid reasons to oppose him in the primaries. There were no valid reasons to oppose him in the general election. I said all these things then, and have thus far been validated beyond my wildest dreams.
In terms of policy, Donald Trump is a conservative dream. From appointing a conservative to the Supreme Court, to approving the Keystone XL pipeline, to weakening the fanatical, hysterical, and tyrannical EPA, to appointing an ambassador to the United Nations who has moral contempt for that immoral institution, to backing Israel, to seeking to reduce economy-choking regulations on business – indeed essentially everything conservatives would wish for in a president – Donald Trump is almost too good to be true.
But he’s still not good enough for those conservatives who remain Never-Trumpers or good enough for the House members of Freedom Caucus, at least with regard to the repeal and replace Obamacare bill that President Trump worked so hard to have passed.
It is quite possible that I and most other conservatives who supported the repeal bill agree with just about every criticism of the bill that House conservatives made.
But, just as in the general election the question wasn't whether candidate Trump was our ideal, the question now wasn’t whether the bill was our ideal. The question during the election was: What will happen if the Democrats and the Left win the presidency again? And the question now was and remains: What will happen if the Republicans don’t pass a bill favored by all but 25-30 Republican Congressmen and, most important, by President Trump?
But purists don’t ask such questions. They live in a somewhat different world than the rest of us who actually agree with them on everything. Because we don’t ask what is ideologically pure and true to our principles. We ask: What is closest to our ideology and to our principles?
Or, to put it another way, we have one larger principle than even the conservative ones we share with the purists – defeating the left because that is the No. 1 priority of those who cherish Western Civilization and regard America as the last best hope for humanity.
The conservative Never-Trumpers and conservatives who voted for Trump had everything in common except for that overriding principle. Conservatives who voted for Trump believed that defeating the Left is the overriding moral good of our time. We are certain that the Left (not the traditional liberal) is destroying Western Civilization, including, obviously, the United States. The external enemy of Western Civilization are the Islamists (the tens or perhaps hundreds of million of Muslims who wish to see the world governed by Sharia), and the internal enemy of the West is the left. What the left has done to the universities and to Western culture at the universities is a perfect example.
Passing even a tepid first bill to begin the process of dismantling the crushing burden of Obamacare would have been an important first step in weakening the left – not only by beginning to repeal Obamacare but by strengthening the Trump presidency and the president’s ability to go forward with tax-reform and other parts of his conservative agenda. The president is now damaged, and the Republican Party looks ludicrous – what other word can one use to describe the party that passed 60 resolutions in seven years to repeal Obamacare and then can’t pass a bill to repeal or replace Obamacare when it is given the House, the Senate, and the presidency?
Make no mistake, ye of pure heart, this may well be the last time in your lifetimes that Republicans control both Houses of Congress and have a conservative president. And understand that time is not on our side; there are cfongressional elections in a year and nine months.
Providence or luck made it possible to have a conservative president. Act accordingly.
And perhaps consider inscribing on the walls of your House and Senate offices a motto as relevant as “In God We Trust” – “The Best Is the Enemy of the Better.”
Trump/Ryan care was a crap sandwich.
Full Repeal bill has already passed both the House and the Senate. It has already be reintroduced. The only reason it doesn’t come to the floor in the future is because someone Ryan or Trump blocked it.
Purists Kill Whatever They Believe In>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The HFC are not purists. The wanted a bill for the People, not for the Insurance Companies and Big Pharm. Ryan’s bill was like an expropriation bill, instead of real property it was expropriation of peoples wallets, a handover to the Insurance Companies who ruined private health care in the first place.
Nothing purist about wanting a free market of Health Insurance, without government interference.Its what America expects.
The Freedom Caucus members opposed a bill that had the support of 17% -- yes, that's SEVENTEEN percent -- of the American people. They were not "purists" at all. They recognized a political disaster for what it was.
Donald Trump actually came up with a seven-point health care reform plan during the 2016 campaign. Ryan's AHCA bill was a pathetic mockery of that plan -- containing NO provisions that actually reflected any one of those seven points. The AHCA was also such a weak and ineffective bill because Ryan claimed that it had to be this way in order to pass in the Senate where 60 votes would be needed to pass a true repeal of Obamacare. This directly contradicts what Ryan himself said in early 2016, when he claimed that Obamacare could be repealed with a simple majority vote.
Shame on you, Mr. Prager. When choosing between the "purists" and the liars, you hitched yourself to the latter.
Excuse my ignorance, but what does HFC mean?
“According to The New York Times, 10 moderates, 15 conservatives, and eight other Republicans would have voted against the Republican repeal and replace Obamacare bill. So, then, 15 or so conservatives made it impossible to pass the bill favored by nearly every other Republican and by President Donald Trump.”
Well, Prager, was it the 15 conservatives who killed this Dream Bill or was it the “10 moderates + 8 others” who killed it? Fifteen members on their own could not have stopped ObummerCare 2.0.
The root of the failure is that it was a bill struck in secret by Ryan and who knows who else with no input from conservatives.
BTW, FR still is a conservative site isn’t it?
It may or may not be true about the Obamacare repeal fiasco, but Praeger is generally right. I’ve often enough seen big time libs elected to state offices because some dopehead “libertarian” decided to run for vanity reasons, ostensibly because the conservative candidate wasn’t “pure” enough. Not many votes for the dude, but 2 or 3 percent is enough to tip the scales these days, and totally queer an election.
Most of the Trump supporters are win-at-any-cost. Forget the context, forget the legislation, just tweet that Trump got his way and start some MAGA threads. All the while throwing the Conservatives, who recognized this bill was nothing that they wanted or had promised the American people, under the bus.
And Trump did the same with his silly “vote for it or get primaried” ultimatum.
Trump supports the tenants of BOCare, which is why he campaigned on “repeal and REPLACE.” Never just repeal.
I still want him to succeed, but he’s a NY Liberal at heart. That slip will show every so often.
“BTW, FR still is a conservative site isn’t it?”
Sadly, no.
Refusal to eat a Swampcritter-written Crap Sandwich = being a “purist”.
“Purist” is the latest perjorative favored to be applied to actual conservatives.
Define conservative? The word means nothing. Just like liberal has lost it’s meaning.
You mean K Street Cheap labor lackey conservatives? Or real American patriots like Trump?
I think you are proving the author’s point.
“GIVE US THE BILL THAT PASSED LAST YEAR!!!! IT IS ASSURED TO PASS THIS YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!”........right?
You do know why it sailed through last year, dont you?
That’s the la la land child-like stupidity that the HFC and supporters were inhaling last week. The idea that there would be no amendments, no filibuster, and nothing but smooth sailing.
The votes last year were SHOW because Obama would veto each and every one....which he did.
The actual process of dismantling it would be in phases, and would be FOUGHT with every parliamentary move in the book, and would not be done overnight. Obamacare itself took months to get voted on, and wasn’t even considered the “end game” the Democrats wanted, and those guys had a larger majority than the GOP has now.
I didn’t like the bill as it was, but I’m not so pig-headed as to not know there were plenty of chances for amendments, debates, and moves because it was only moving out of the House! It still had to go to the Senate, and then it had to come BACK to the House again!
The problem with the HFC is that they were RIGHT to hate it, but they wanted to make a damn grandstand for virtue signal sake when they should have fought through the process to change it on both sides of the hill and in the WH.
They didnt even want the process to even move. better to
FUBAR a bunch of other things then to lose face on passage that wasn’t even remotely the end, but just the end of the beginning.
NO.
What you have here is a sh#t sandwich that they refused to eat.
The RHINOs did not expect to win the ‘16 election EITHER. The had NOTHING to replace Obamacare. They lacked the b#lls to simply repeal it.
Hence this mess.
Simple answer here is anyone who opposed this bill based on the concept of individual liberty.
But if you require definition and I, in turn, have to defend Conservative principles on a site like this, then chances are you are not one.
“Nothing purist about wanting a free market of Health Insurance, without government interference.Its what America expects.”
So what made you think that it passing the House = it becomes law?
Dennis Prager ignores a couple of important points.
1. People are getting weary of Congress bringing forth from the cover of darkness new legislation that is thousands of pages long, written by unknown authors, and dropping it upon us with no chance to read and understand the legislation.
2. Prager also ignored the salient fact that only 17% of those polled approved RyanCare.
When Congress starts listening to ‘We the People’, maybe then we will be more supportive of them.
If he puts forth a bill that does not only do what he said he would do but what the American people want, then I will jump on the “hope” wagon with you.
I like Trump, don’t get me wrong. But I like a conservative America more. Let’s pass what makes sense and force a change to what doesn’t.
This bill didn’t make sense.
Purists have killed self-government.
Purists have for several decades smugly refused to take an active part in day to day and off-year political meetings. This is how DC RINOs have avoided answering to the people back home. Self-government cannot happen by spending a few minutes in a voting booth a few times a decade.
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