Senate Republicans Run Up White Flag

Goldwater-Rockefeller redux

By: Patrick J. Buchanan
10/15/2013 09:40 AM

“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Mark Twain’s insight comes to mind as one observes the panic of Beltway Republicans over the latest polls in the battle of Obamacare.

According to Gallup, approval of the Republican Party has sunk 10 points in two weeks to 28 percent, an all-time low. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, approval of the GOP has fallen to 24 percent.

In the campaign to persuade America of their Big Lie — that the House Republicans shut down the government — the White House and its media chorus appear to have won this round.

Yet, the truth is the Republicans’ House has voted three times to keep open and to fund every agency, department and program of the U.S. government, except for Obamacare.

And they voted to kill that monstrosity but once.

Republicans should refuse to raise the white flag and insist on an honorable avenue of retreat.

And if Harry Reid’s Senate demands the GOP end the sequester on federal spending, or be blamed for a debt default, the party should, Samson-like, bring down the roof of the temple on everybody’s head.

This is an honorable battle lost, not a war.

Why, after all, did Republicans stand up? Because they believe Obamacare is an abomination, a new entitlement program this nation, lurching toward bankruptcy, cannot afford.

It is imposing increases in health care premiums on millions of Americans, disrupting doctor-patient relationships and forcing businesses to cut workers back to 29 hours a week. Even Democratic Sen. Max Baucus has predicted a coming “train wreck.”

Now if the Republican Party believes this, what choice did the House have except to fight to defund or postpone it, against all odds, and tune out the whining of the “We-can’t-win!” Republican establishment?

And if Republicans are paralyzed by polls produced by this three-week skirmish, they should reread the history of the party and the movement to which they profess to belong.

In the early 1960s, when the postwar right rose to challenge JFK with Mr. Conservative, events and actions conspired to put Barry Goldwater in the worst hole of a Republican nominee in history.

Kennedy was murdered in Dallas one year before the election. Goldwater had glibly hinted he would privatize Social Security, sell the Tennessee Valley Authority and “lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin.”

After his defeat of Nelson Rockefeller in the California primary assured his nomination, Goldwater was 59 points behind LBJ — 77-18.

The Republican liberals — Govs. Rockefeller, George Romney and William Scranton — to the cheers of the Washington press, began to attack Goldwater for “extremism” and failing to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

At the Cow Palace convention, liberals demanded Goldwater rewrite the platform to equate The John Birch Society with the Communist Party USA and the Ku Klux Klan, which had murdered four black girls at a Birmingham church in 1963 and three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss., that same summer.

Goldwater rejected this stinking outrage, declaring, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” And, so, the liberals all abandoned him.

One man stood by Goldwater. The two-time loser Richard Nixon, who had not won a race in his own right since 1950, campaigned for Goldwater and the party longer and harder than Barry himself.

And what became of them all?

Bill Scranton packed it in 1966. George Romney was trounced in 1968 by Nixon, with Goldwater’s legions at his side, in New Hampshire, and quit the race two weeks before the returns came in.

Rockefeller, who had spent a career calling Nixon a “loser,” lacked what it took to challenge Nixon in any of the contested primaries.

And, lest we forget, one other national Republican spoke up for Goldwater and conservatism in that 1964 humiliation, the retired Hollywood actor and impresario of GE Theater: Ronald Reagan.

Nixon and Reagan would go on to win four of the next five GOP nominations and presidential elections. In the one convention Reagan lost, 1976, the right, as the price of its support of Gerald R. Ford, demanded that Nelson Rockefeller be dumped as vice president.

Done. Rocky was last seen flipping a middle finger to the delegates happily marking “paid” on his account.

Prediction: The people who fought the battle of Obamacare will be proven right to have fought it, and America will come to see this.

And the people who said, “We can’t win!” will never win.

America is at a turning point.

If she does not stop squandering hundreds of billions on liberal agenda items like Obamacare and if she do not end these trade deficits sucking the jobs, factories and investment capital out of our country, we will find ourselves beside Greece, Spain, Illinois and Detroit.

Even if America disagrees, as in 1964 when it embraced LBJ’s Great Society plunge to social and economic disaster, Republicans need to stand up — current polls and corporate Republicans be damned.

If the right is right, time will prove it, as it did long ago.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/10/15/goldwater-rockefeller-redux/

 

<u>GOP moderates hate minorities</u>

House Republican: 'Ranks begin to break soon. Members shouldn't be held hostage by minority of caucus. Our leaders have allowed to happen. Amateurs

from breakingnews.com

 

Maybe so. So yes, Obamney care is a disaster. Should we go back to what existed, another disaster, or should we move to something better? What is that? We need specifics, We can't go on the way we were, and we can't go on the way we are. So what is your proposal?

 

Just curious, but why do you continue to be the only one on the planet to call it "Obamney Care"? What's your angle?

 

Tao, it has to do with reality. Actually Oboma's name should not be attached to the ACA at all, nor Romney's. My calling it Obomney care is in reaction to the absurdity of calling it Obomacare. Please read the following which explains where the ACA really comes from. Frankly it is a mess because of all the political tampering. In the end the features that were in the legislation that would have allowed it to function somewhat were either removed through the political process or damaged by the Court. In my opinion it wasn't the best way to go in the first place, but it could have worked had it not been so severely altered by the time it was passed by an entirely partisan effort. But keep in mind that what the Democrats passed is not at all what the majority of Democrats would have preferred. That's what's so ironic about this entire mess. In the end we ended up with something no one wanted. The ACA is an example of the democratic political process at its worst.

The following is from Wiki:

Background

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act consists of a combination of measures to control healthcare costs, and an expansion of coverage through public and private insurance: broader Medicaid eligibility and Medicare coverage, and subsidized, regulated private insurance. An individual mandate coupled with subsidies for private insurance as a means for universal healthcare was considered the best way to win the support of the Senate because it had been included in prior bipartisan reform proposals. The idea goes back as far as 1989, when it was initially proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation as an alternative to single-payer health care.[50] It was championed by many Republican politicians as a market-based approach to healthcare reform on the basis of individual responsibility. Specifically, because the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires any hospital participating in Medicare (which nearly all do) to provide emergency care to anyone who needs it, the government often indirectly bore the cost of those without the ability to pay.[51][52][53]

When, in 1993, President Bill Clinton proposed a healthcare reform bill that included a mandate for employers to provide health insurance to all employees through a regulated marketplace of health maintenance organizations, Republican Senators proposed an alternative that would have required individuals, but not employers, to buy insurance.[52] Ultimately the Clinton plan failed due to concerns that it was overly complex, amid an unprecedented barrage of negative advertising funded by politically conservative groups and the health insurance industry.[54] After failing to obtain a comprehensive reform of the healthcare system, Clinton negotiated a compromise with the 105th Congress to instead enact the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997.[55]

The 1993 Republican alternative, introduced by Senator John Chafee as the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act, contained a "universal coverage" requirement with a penalty for noncompliance—an individual mandate—as well as subsidies to be used in state-based 'purchasing groups.'[56] Advocates for the 1993 bill included prominent Republicans who today oppose a mandate, such as Senators Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, and Kit Bond.[57][58] Of the 43 Republicans Senators from 1993, almost half—20 out of 43—supported the HEART Act.[50][59] Another Republican proposal, introduced in 1994 by Senator Don Nickles, the Consumer Choice Health Security Act, also contained an individual mandate with a penalty provision;[60] however, Nickles subsequently removed the mandate from the bill, stating he had decided "that government should not compel people to buy health insurance."[61] At the time of these proposals, Republicans did not raise constitutional issues with the mandate; Mark Pauly, who helped develop a proposal that included an individual mandate for George H.W. Bush, remarked, "I don’t remember that being raised at all. The way it was viewed by the Congressional Budget Office in 1994 was, effectively, as a tax."[50]

An individual health insurance mandate and an insurance exchange was also enacted at the state level in Massachusetts: In 2006, Republican Governor Mitt Romney signed an insurance expansion bill with strong bipartisan support, including that of Senator Ted Kennedy. Romney's successful implementation of the 'Health Connector' exchange and individual mandate in Massachusetts was at first lauded by Republicans. During Romney's 2008 presidential campaign, Senator Jim DeMint praised Romney's ability to "take some good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured." Romney himself said of the individual mandate: "I'm proud of what we've done. If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be the model for the nation."[62]

In 2007, a year after the Massachusetts reform, Republican Senator Bob Bennett and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden introduced the Healthy Americans Act, which also featured an individual mandate and state-based regulated insurance markets called "State Health Help Agencies".[53][62] The bill attracted bipartisan support but died in committee; however, many of the sponsors and co-sponsors remained in Congress during the 2008 healthcare debate.[63]

Given the history of bipartisan support for an individual mandate and regulated insurance markets with subsidies as well as their perceived success in Massachusetts, by 2008 Democrats were considering using this approach as the basis for comprehensive, national healthcare reform. Experts have pointed out that the legislation that eventually emerged from Congress in 2009 and 2010 bears many similarities to the 2007 bill[56] and that it was deliberately patterned after Romney's state healthcare plan.[64] Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of the Massachusetts reform who advised the Clinton and Obama presidential campaigns on their healthcare proposals, served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration and helped Congress draft the ACA.[65]

 

No need to break ranks. Boehner should just ask all his guys to go home for 6 months. Bondholders will be paid, that's guaranteed. There is no way they will not service the debt.

This is the only way to force Obama to cut Obamacare/entitlements and benefits.

 

Piezoe, Romney had nothing to do with the ACA. Just because Mass had a similar program passed by dems and Romney has nothing to do with the national ACA. What is good for one state is not necessarily good for all the others. To use our earlier discussion on the EU monetary policy, that would be like blaming the Bundesbank for tight monetary policy throughout the EU (which the ECB has tried to imitate) for the failure of it throughout the EZ. It worked in Germany, and that's all the Bundesbank cared about. It's a shaky analogy, but you get my point.

You're showing your true colors each time you call it that. And your true colors, as most of us know but you tend to deny, are a deep blue.

 

I think they should do something like that.

Kind of like the democrats in Wisconsin did to block a quorum in the state legislature . As I recall, Obama and the media thought that was an heroic jesture.

You will never get someone to negotiate seriously with you if they are convinced you are bluffing and will fold. Now is the time for the Tea Party folks to show that they aren't bluffing.

Or we can just go back to doing things the way we have been, which has resulted in a zillion dollar debt that we can only service by printing money.

 

I agree, Romney's name should not be attached to the Final version of the ACA either. But I think it is a good idea so long as others insist on calling it Obomacare to call it Obomney care just to remind people of it's true origin.

I'm proud of what we've done. If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be the model for the nation.-- Mitt Romney

 

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