Free Republic

Friday on Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Company,” conservative columnist Ann Coulter said the Senate Republicans’ health care bill was a “total disaster” because it is “Obamacare-lite.” Coulter called for a “one-sentence law saying there shall be a free market in health insurance.” “[U]nder the Republicans’ health care bill, guess who’s still paying for transgender operations? Guess who still can’t go to Memorial Sloan Kettering? Guess who will still be paying 700 dollars a month for heath insurance? ... “This is going to ruin Republicans if this passes because it’s Obamacare lite,” she added.”Now Republican will get blamed for it....

Three senior Senate Republicans on Monday proposed an alternative to ObamaCare that would replace “job-crushing” federal mandates with a voluntary system led by the states. The legislative blueprint from Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) would eliminate all of the healthcare law’s federal rules, including the unpopular requirement to purchase insurance under the threat of penalty. But the GOP proposal, known as the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment (CARE) Act, would also weaken one of ObamaCare’s most popular provisions, by giving insurers an opening to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. The CARE Act...

WASHINGTON -- Top Republicans are increasingly worried that GOP candidates this fall might be burned by a fire that's roaring through the conservative base: demand for the repeal of President Barack Obama's new health care law.

GOP Sees Risks in Push to Repeal Health Law WASHINGTON -- Top Republicans are increasingly worried that GOP candidates this fall might be burned by a fire that's roaring through the conservative base: demand for the repeal of President Barack Obama's new health care law. It's fine to criticize the health law and the way Democrats pushed it through Congress without a single GOP vote, these party leaders say. But focusing on its outright repeal carries two big risks. Repeal is politically and legally unlikely, and grass-roots activists may feel disillusioned by a failed crusade. More important, say strategists from...

In the days since the enactment of their health care plan, Democrats in Washington have been desperately seeking to lodge the new program in the pantheon of American public-policy achievements. House Democratic whip James Clyburn compared the bill to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Vice President Biden argued it vindicates a century of health reform efforts by Democrats and Republicans alike. House speaker Nancy Pelosi said “health insurance reform will stand alongside Social Security and Medicare in the annals of American history.” Even putting aside the fact that Social Security and Medicare are going broke and taking the rest...

Feeling chipper after Democrats prevailed over an ineffectively small Republican contingent in Congress to pass his multi-trillion dollar healthcare reform bill, President Barack Obama dared opponents to try to repeal it. Republican vows to repeal the law are fueled by polls showing a substantial majority of voters want them to do that very thing should they gain a majority in Congress in the November elections. “They shouldn’t be so sure they’ll gain seats in the election,” Obama warned. “Voters love getting government handouts. Politicians who try to take them away usually don’t fare well on election day.” The President added...

Representatives passed sweeping health care legislation last Sunday, 41% of voters nationwide favored the legislation while 54% were opposed. Now that President Obama has signed the legislation into law, most voters want to see it repealed. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the first two nights after the president signed the bill, shows that 55% favor repealing the legislation. Forty-two percent (42%) oppose repeal. Those figures include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal and 35% who Strongly Oppose it. In terms of Election 2010, 52% say they’d vote for a candidate who favors repeal over one who does...

WASHINGTON – Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it.

Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for the Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday. The ouster also came one day after a harsh Wall Street Journal editorial about the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, which said that he "now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans" and accused him of "peddling bad revisionist history." Frum made clear in a letter to AEI President Arthur Brooks that his departure after seven years at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. "I have had...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Two new national polls show Americans want the pro-abortion health care bill President Barack Obama signed into law repealed. They also show voters want Republican lawmakers to keep fighting against the government-run health care system and to promote legislation to repeal it. Just before the House passed and Obama signed the health care bill that funds abortions, Americans opposed it on a 54-41 percentage point margin, according to Rasmussen.The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the first two nights after the president signed the bill, shows 55 percent want the law repealed whiled 42...

President Obama mocked Republicans' campaign to try to repeal his new health care law, saying Thursday they should "Go for it" and see how well they fare with voters.

Senate Republicans have successfully identified two minor violations of reconciliation rules in the final piece of the health package, according to aides from both parties. The violations will force the Senate to change the bill and ship it back to the House for final passage. But Democratic leaders said the provisions that will be struck from the part of the bill dealing with Pell Grants for college students do not significantly affect the student loan program or the health care bill overall.

March 25, 2010 G.O.P. Forces New House Vote on Package of Health Bill Changes By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON — With the Senate working through an all-night session on a package of changes to the Democrats’ sweeping health care legislation, Republicans early on Thursday morning identified parliamentary problems with at least two provisions that will require the measure to be sent back to the House for yet another vote, once the Senate adopts it. Senate Democrats had been hoping to defeat all of the amendments proposed by Republicans and to prevail on parliamentary challenges so that they...

On the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to the city, the dreary weather didn’t stop hundreds of people from coming out to listen to local republicans protest the passing of the health care reform bill. Wednesday evening brought out a crowd that tossed around words like tyranny, socialism, and unconstitutional to describe their disapproval of the bill some claimed was against people’s wishes. “Tonight isn’t about Democrats, or Republicans, or Independents. It’s about all Americans,” Matt Strawn, Republican Party of Iowa chairman, said during the “Stand up For Freedom” rally. “We have to show America this is not freedom.”...

David Axelrod tells the Huffington Post that health-care reform passed because Republicans downgraded to DEFCON 2 after Scott Brown's surprise victory in the Massachusetts Senate race: "Some of the steam went out of the opposition after that," Axelrod said. "I think that people felt like they had made a statement. Perhaps they felt like they had killed health care reform... They thought the fight was over. And that [the president] couldn't now succeed. I do believe that. And it is almost as if they had made the statement that they thought they had stopped the thing. And so it created...

A CBS News poll released Wednesday finds that nearly two in three Americans want Republicans in Congress to continue to challenge parts of the health care reform bill. The Senate version of the legislation was passed by the House Sunday night, and President Obama signed it into law on Tuesday. The House also passed a separate reconciliation bill, which cannot be filibustered, that is now being debated in the Senate. That bill would make changes to the bill already signed into law. Senate Republicans are now challenging whether the bill is truly a budget reconciliation bill (which is what makes...

Senate Republicans are making a last-ditch effort Wednesday to derail health care legislation by forcing Democrats to vote on a series of politically dicey matters relating to the health care "fixes" sent over by the House this week. The "fix-it" bill makes adjustments to the legislation President Obama signed into law Tuesday. Republicans are raising a series of amendments in hopes of changing any part of the "fix-it" bill to delay implementation and send it back to the House for additional votes. The Senate will vote on 20 to 25 amendments -- including ones to ban various Medicare cuts, special...

Democratic senators ripped their Republican counterparts for forcing cancellations of hearings throughout the Senate on Wednesday, claiming that the GOP is needlessly blocking essential national security business. Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Claire McCaskill both complained that Republicans kept them from holding their hearings on budget requests for the military's Pacific and strategic and police training contracts in Afghanistan. Either party in the Senate is allowed to object to holding hearings, as Senate rules require a unanimous consent request for hearings to be held after 2 p.m. Most of these unanimous consent requests aren’t even noticed on...

Senate Republicans have backed away from a plan to offer hundreds of amendments to slow the passage of healthcare reform fixes under budget reconciliation. This means the Senate will finish work on House-demanded changes to healthcare reform law sooner than expected. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had hoped to finish the process by Friday or Saturday but now Thursday afternoon appears a possible end-point.

As previously noted, every single poll about this nightmare from now to November and beyond will be fraught with meaning and hyped to the skies as the true barometer of public sentiment about The Boondoggle That Saved America. That said, I’m more than happy to hype this one. Shazam: The poll finds that 62 percent want Congressional Republicans to keep challenging the bill, while 33 percent say they should not do so. Nearly nine in ten Republicans and two in three independents want the GOP to keep challenging. Even 41 percent of Democrats support continued challenges. Americans are split about...