MitchMcConnell’semptypromise:We’llforceObamato

Mitch McConnell’s empty promise: We’ll force Obama to rein in government or else risk a shutdown

posted at 3:21 pm on August 20, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Does anyone actually believe this?

I guess Kentucky Republicans who don’t pay attention to politics but who’ll end up deciding this year’s Senate race anyway do. God bless democracy.

“We’re going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy,” McConnell said in an interview aboard his campaign bus traveling through Western Kentucky coal country. “That’s something he won’t like, but that will be done. I guarantee it.”…

McConnell risks overreaching if he follows through with his pledge to attach policy riders to spending bills. If Obama refuses to accept such measures, a government shutdown could ensue. Republicans bore much of the blame for last year’s government shutdown, which was prompted by conservative tactics McConnell opposed, and their fortunes rebounded only when the administration bungled the rollout of Obamacare.

But asked about the potential that his approach could spark another shutdown, McConnell said it would be up to the president to decide whether to veto spending bills that would keep the government open.

Obama “needs to be challenged, and the best way to do that is through the funding process,” McConnell said. “He would have to make a decision on a given bill, whether there’s more in it that he likes than dislikes.”

To repeat: Does anyone actually believe this? McConnell was one of the sharpest Republican critics of the “defund” strategy that produced a government shutdown last fall. Watch the clip below if you need your memory refreshed. He’s fond of saying about it, “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” i.e. the GOP paid a political price for the 1995 shutdown and then foolishly paid the same price again in 2013 (although the backlash was blunted by public outrage at the Healthcare.gov meltdown that was happening simultaneously). Quote: “I think we have fully now acquainted our new members with what a losing strategy that is.” He hates shutdowns almost as much as the people in the GOP’s donor class who bankroll him do.

And yet here he is, soothing conservatives who are leery of reelecting him by vowing to take the fight to Obama this time and make him cause a shutdown if he refuses to agree to Republican demands. And he wants you to believe he’s going to do this while prominent Republicans, including his pal Rand Paul, are declaring their candidacies in 2016. It’s the purest nonsense. To believe it, you need to believe that somehow, if Obama vetoes the sort of bill McConnell’s describing here, that the GOP will win the ensuing media war over who “really” caused the shutdown. Which party, do you suppose, will the press hold responsible? Whom did they hold responsible in 1995, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and went head to head with a Democratic president? The party that loves government, the bigger the better, or the one that doesn’t?

McConnell has a history of empty rhetoric about brinksmanship with Obama too. Remember this?

The Senate’s top Republican signaled Tuesday that he will seek to extract concessions from Democrats in exchange for lifting the nation’s debt limit in 2014, potentially foreshadowing a grueling fiscal fight during an election year.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that he “can’t imagine” that the debt ceiling increase will be a “clean” one — meaning that it will have no conditions attached to it. McConnell, a key negotiator on deals ending the debt ceiling standoff in 2011 and this year during the government shutdown, noted that past significant legislative agreements have been attached to such increases. He was skeptical that the House or the Senate would have an appetite to hand President Barack Obama a clean debt limit hike.

Two months later he voted for cloture on — ta da — a clean debt-ceiling hike, even though Harry Reid had more than enough votes without him to break a filibuster by Ted Cruz. And so we already know what’ll happen next year: McConnell and Boehner will pass a spending bill with some riders attached, Obama will veto it, a shutdown deadline will loom, and eventually McConnell will agree to a clean bill while promising to fight another day. How many times do you need to see this movie to know the plot?

It will, perhaps, not surprise you to learn that Kentucky Democrats are having a field day with the excerpt above, claiming that McConnell’s already cooking up new shutdowns for America. They know which side is helped by shutdown politics. And so does Mitch the Knife, which, again, is why this is an empty threat.

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Tags: defund, grimes, Kentucky, majority, Mitch McConnell, obama, Senate, shutdown, Tea Party

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AffordableCareAct?Thesecondbiglie

Affordable Care Act? The second big lie

posted at 11:21 am on November 14, 2013 by Bruce McQuain

Everyone lately has been focused on President Obama’s whopper about being able to keep one’s insurance policy if they liked it. But perhaps the biggest lie about the entire law is to be found in it’s official title with the word “affordable”. The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, made the promise that everyone would have health care insurance and (except for those who liked their plan and planned on keeping it — period) it would be “more affordable.”  Everyone would have lower premiums and better options.

Oh they used the magic buzz word “competition” to try to make their government run and regulated exchanges sound like a real marketplace, but in reality they are anything but that.

Result? Well that’s where the biggest lie comes in:

It also isn’t funny to those who are seeing their premiums go up. According to Heritage researcher Drew Gonshorowski, premiums are going to increase for individuals buying insurance in the exchanges in at least 42  of 47 states.

In fact, health care costs will rise across the board. As Bob Moffit, a Senior Fellow for Health Policy Studies at Heritage, has said, “No matter how you look at this, health care costs both for individuals and for the country as a whole are going to increase.” There are many reasons for this, as Moffit mentioned—namely, 18 new tax hikes, $1.8 trillion in new health care entitlement spending, and new benefit mandates.

Gullibility is another word that needs to be talked about a bit more as well.  How gullible are those who really believed that expanding health insurance via 18 new tax hikes and $1.8 trillion in new entitlement spending was going to somehow be more “affordable” in the first place and not effect them in the second?   And when we found out that ObamaCare would require  every policy to have minimum benefits whether or not the policy holder wanted or needed them, how did we figure that would be cheaper and – something we could keep, period?

Then add on the 18,000 or so new IRS agents, the untold number of boards and bureaucrats and the mountains of rules and regulations.  Cheaper?  More affordable?  Really?

The Democrats and Obama counted on a large portion of the population being gullible enough to believe the big lie, despite the obvious tons of reasons (and facts) not to believe them.  And, as polls have indicated from the beginning, the majority of America wasn’t at all convinced that the promises had any basis in reality.  They and the GOP were against it and resisted it from the beginning.  As it turns out, they were right to do so.

There is nothing “affordable” about this farce known as the Affordable Care Act.  As Ed Fuelner says at the Heritage Foundation:

Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster for our country. This is why it would have been better to defund it before it took the toll that it is already taking on so many American citizens.

Note the third word of interest in this post – “defund”.  Somehow among much of the GOP “defund” has turned into “replace”, as in “with what should we replace this disaster”.

That brings us to a quote by another great American, Thomas Sowell, who answers the question quite succinctly:

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: “But what would you replace it with?” When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Nothing.  And that’s why ObamaCare’s future should be to end up in the ash heap of history and be replaced with … nothing.  It was a lie from the beginning, it is a failure on implementation and as any good tactician will tell you, you don’t reinforce failure.

~McQ

Tags: ACA, Affordable Care Act, defund, Heritage Foundation, Thomas Sowell

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TopCuccinelliadvisor:Whatkilledusmorethan

Top Cuccinelli advisor: What killed us more than anything was … the shutdown

posted at 7:21 pm on November 7, 2013 by Allahpundit

It’s Chris La Civita, the same guy whose comment Tuesday night about national Republicans abandoning Cooch in early October lit the fuse of the RINO/tea party powderkeg that exploded yesterday. Don’t blame the RNC, he now says. Blame the damned shutdown, which of course was very strongly opposed by the big-money RINOs who’ve been slammed for supposedly having stabbed Cuccinelli in the back.

“It moved the disaster of Obamacare away from our narrative,” he says, in an interview with National Review Online. “It sucked the oxygen out of the room. Instead of talking about Obamacare, we were talking about the shutdown.”

In mid October, LaCivita says, the campaign was startled by how the shutdown affected their momentum. Their internal poll numbers dipped and several of the Virginia attorney general’s donors, especially conservative groups aligned with Cuccinelli, “suddenly became gun-shy.”…

LaCivita, however, doesn’t blame national Republican power brokers for Cuccinelli’s loss. Yes, he says, they spent less in Virginia than they did during the 2009 gubernatorial race, which was easily won by Republican Bob McDonnell. But they did step up, he says, and provided valuable support.

“Wait a sec,” you say. “Didn’t the exit polls in Virginia show that voters there blamed the GOP and Obama nearly equally for the shutdown?” Indeed they did, but La Civita’s not really claiming otherwise. He’s not saying that people turned against Cooch because of it, he’s saying that the campaign was deprived of the chance to spend the entire final month hammering McAuliffe on O-Care. The shutdown was a distraction at a crucial moment. Then again, just because the final exits showed a nearly even split on blame doesn’t mean that that split was even all along. La Civita himself says Cuccinelli’s polling dropped initially because of it, which evidently was enough to convince some righty donors that he was a lost cause. Dig a bit further into the exits and you’ll see that the shutdown hurt Cooch a lot with a not-so-small segment of the electorate: “[McAuliffe] also won the three in 10 Virginia voters who said someone in their household was affected by the partial federal shutdown last month, by a 19-point margin.” Maybe most of those were Democratic households to begin with, but not all were. Some were surely headed by people in the defense industry. How many potential GOP votes switched there?

It could even be that the reason the polls didn’t detect Cuccinelli’s near-win is because anger over the shutdown gradually evaporated after it ended. As the story of the government closing down faded and the story of the O-Care trainwreck emerged, people who were initially sour on the GOP because of the former began to see some merit in the “defund” campaign in hindsight — just not quite enough to bring Cooch all the way back from the hit he took earlier in the month. That’s conjecture, but it’s interesting that a guy as close to Cuccinelli as LaCivita would say something that might feed it. Ah well. Doesn’t really matter. Both wings of the party are convinced that it was the other side that kneecapped Ken. Nothing will change that.

Exit question: Many grassroots conservative groups spent money to try to elect Cuccinelli, but some didn’t — and they’re criticizing the RNC anyway for having spent “only” $3 million. How come?

Tags: advisor, cruz, cuccinelli, defund, establishment, la civita, Republicans In Name Only, rnc, shutdown, Tea Party, Virginia

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Video:TedCruzrejectsthe“letitburn”

Video: Ted Cruz rejects the “let it burn” approach to ObamaCare

posted at 7:21 pm on October 21, 2013 by Allahpundit

I asked about “let it burn” a few weeks ago and never heard any solid explanations for why grassroots righties had abandoned it in favor of the “defund” strategy, which aimed to stop ObamaCare before it started burning on October 1. The point of LIB, which got some traction on conservative blogs after the fiscal cliff deal last year, is that American voters will never learn their lessons about statism unless they’re forced to suffer the consequences of statist policies. It’s no use preaching conservatism to the public; the fact that liberal utopia can’t pay for itself won’t be absorbed until people experience it firsthand. It’s a sort of Cloward-Piven strategy in reverse, I’ve always thought: Instead of leftists bringing down the system to create political space for something even further left, the failure of the Democratic agenda in toto would finally clear the way for a conservative revival. The people want ObamaCare? Good, let them have it. Enjoy the higher premiums and industry death spiral, and as you do, remember that this was exclusively a Democratic production. This is what electing liberals gets you.

That’s LIB in a nutshell, which, like I say, wasn’t uncommon during and after the fiscal cliff but was mostly AWOL from the last two months of the ObamaCare debate. Here’s Ted Cruz, leader of the “defund” movement, offering one reason why: It’s cruel! People will suffer under LIB, by design. Even if the GOP ultimately gains from it politically, and even if they crave that political gain mainly because it’ll give them a chance to do good for the public policy-wise, a lot of pain will be felt by a lot of people before you reach that point. If you can stop O-Care before it starts (which Cruz never could, but we don’t need to rehash that), why not do it? That’s one big reason why some people backed LIB for the fiscal cliff but not for ObamaCare, I think — this was a chance, however slim, to halt a paradigm-shifting new bit of the liberal agenda before it even started. To let it take effect without objection in the dark hope that it would lead the public to temporary ruin was too hard for anyone who’s politically engaged to stomach. To put it differently, LIB was really a creature of despair after last November’s bitter defeat; the further we get from that election, the more hope righties have and the more willing they are to fight again. The other reason LIB is disfavored now is, as noted above, because it’s hard to know if the space created by a program’s failure will present an opportunity for the left or for the right. I see conservative commenters say every day that O-Care was designed to fail, to damage the private insurance industry to the point that a bigger government solution is needed to salvage the wreckage. If you embrace LIB and the result is more Democrats in Congress than Republicans, you may be waiting even longer than you thought for things to burn to your liking.

Here’s the question, though: How far does Cruz’s “prevent suffering” principle extend? After all, what he says here is exactly the sort of thing that Obama’s going to start saying if/when he comes to Congress asking for more money to repair Healthcare.gov. Imagine if HHS fixes the front end of the site, so that people can now easily register and enroll, but the back end of the site remains a complete mess, with insurance companies forced to try to process tens of thousands of garbled enrollments in December. People who signed up, especially those with preexisting conditions, will be eager to have their coverage take effect in January. “All we need is $100 million to fix the back end and get this coverage flowing,” O might say. What’s the compassionate play at that point? It’s almost unimaginable that the GOP would appropriate the money and acquiesce in funding Obama’s boondoggle; on the other hand, even if the money is withheld in the name of pressuring Obama to delay the law for awhile, there may be thousands of sick enrollees who’ve already made financial plans based on the expectation of coverage. (This, of course, was precisely the reason Cruz wanted the law stopped before it started. Once people become dependent on the program and its subsidies, it becomes very hard to undo.) So what’s the play then? Dig in, refuse the appropriation, and tell Obama to figure out a way to clean up his own mess, even if that means chaos for the sick and/or an industry death spiral? That would be, essentially, LIB in action. It’d be all Obama’s and the Democrats’ fault, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how to spare people a lot of suffering from their stupidity and incompetence.

Tags: bad samaritan, defund, delay, launch, obama, ObamaCare, shutdown, Ted Cruz, White House

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Uhoh:Carneydodgesquestiononwhetherindividual

Uh oh: Carney dodges question on whether individual mandate might need to be delayed

posted at 5:21 pm on October 21, 2013 by Allahpundit

Actually, I can answer that question for Jon Karl: No, the mandate certainly won’t be delayed. The entire law, including the mandate, might be delayed if HHS can’t get its act together by Thanksgiving, say, but delaying only the mandate would significantly increase the odds of an industry “death spiral.” That’s the only thing right now that’s forcing healthy young uninsured adults into the pool; take away the mandate and leave the rest intact and you’ve got hundreds of thousands of sick people with preexisting conditions diving in with no way to pay for them. Either delay the whole thing and tell the sick to wait ’til next year or maintain the Kafkaesque status quo in which healthy people are penalized for failing to do something which, for technological reasons, the government makes it almost impossible for them to do.

Here’s what Carney told Karl:

CARNEY: We’re three weeks into a six-month enrollment period. As I said, the law itself as written makes clear that Americans with access to affordable insurance would need to have insurance by March 31. But people that do not have access to affordable care, due to a state not expanding Medicaid — and there are states out there who are depriving their own residents of access to expanded Medicaid because they made that choice — or due to other factors, will not be penalized. That is number one. When it comes to the issue I was just talking to Brianna about, with the February 15 marker period, I would refer you to HHS for more details, but they are looking to align the policies, the disconnect between open enrollment period and the individual responsibility timeframes, which exists in the first year only.

What does “access” mean? Tommy Christopher reads it this way:

[I]t seems to m that Carney is hedging on two possible outcomes. If the rollout of the website is smoothed out in fairly short order, then the administration can leave things as they are, and contend that people did have sufficient access. If the problems persist, then they can establish a process whereby people can apply for exemption on a case-by-case basis, so that people in states with successful state-based exchanges might be charged the penalty, while those on the federal exchange might not. In practice, though, they would probably grant the exemption to anyone who asked for it.

That’s great, but if they have to waive billions in revenue due to mandate exemptions, they’ve still got a potential “death spiral” problem. Maybe that’s ironic vindication for John Roberts: People are going to have to pay Uncle Sam to make this new boondoggle semi-viable, whether or not they’ve failed to comply with the law through no fault of their own. It’s a tax! You’re welcome, America.

And now here’s your cue, in case you haven’t read it already, to read Megan McArdle’s post last week arguing that the drop-dead date for ObamaCare is sometime next month, not mid-December or the “six-month enrollment period” as Carney likes to imagine. If the site remains unworkable on the back-end for another month, insurers won’t be able to process the crush of enrollments in late November and December as people scramble to sign up for coverage by January 1. The “six-month enrollment period” is a talking point, nothing more.

Tags: defund, delay, Department of Health and Human Services, Individual Mandate, Jay Carney, karl, obama, ObamaCare, sebelius

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Quotesoftheday postedat8:31

Quotes of the day

posted at 8:31 pm on October 19, 2013 by Allahpundit

Senator Marco Rubio began this year amid buzz that he was the logical choice to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He is likely to finish it on a decidedly lower note, partly removed from the national spotlight, eclipsed by the rising star from Texas, Ted Cruz…

Cruz’s rapid assent has been compared to that of Barack Obama, who as a freshman senator went out of his way to endear himself to his party’s base and position himself to run for higher office in the future. “It’s obvious that he came here with a very different approach, to elevate himself and propel himself to national aspirations,” a GOP strategist tells National Review Online. But Cruz has also become a powerful force within Congress, wielding considerable influence with conservatives in the House. His efforts have almost singlehandedly foiled House speaker John Boehner’s plans on multiple occasions…

“The base is not looking for a conciliator,” says Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a friend of Rubio’s. “They’re not looking for someone who is good at compromising, who can make peace with the other side. They’re looking for someone who will stand up to a very aggressive, disrespectful liberal opposition that’s standing out there with bare knuckles winding up at us every chance they get.”

***

There is also a misunderstanding in the mainstream media about what really motivated these boat-rockers. It wasn’t about actually stopping Democrats from taking the Affordable Care Act across the goal line, nor was it about raising the debt ceiling before Mr. Obama and the Democrats offered any significant spending cuts.

Rather, it was about showing that there were Republicans in Congress who understood that standing and fighting was itself the goal — the endgame that disparaging critics on the left, right and center said was glaringly absent from Mr. Cruz’s crusade…

Liberal and most center-right commentators labeled the Cruz crusaders as hopelessly naive and destructive of their own party. But conservatives beyond the Beltway (and a few inside) saw the Cruz obstinacy as a necessary public rejection of bipartisanship as practiced since the days of President George H.W. Bush’s 1990 budget compromise with Congress‘ Democratic leaders, when he broke his “no new taxes” pledge and accepted the Democrats’ demand to cut spending by $2 for every $1 in tax increases…

“Those Republican rebels in Congress may have demonstrated, at least until the shutdown ended, that there are some GOP leaders still standing for principles and understanding spending and Obamacare are moral issues of the day,” said Solomon Yue, a founder of the RNC’s Conservative Caucus.

***

Drivers speeding down a busy highway about 70 miles outside Houston have been greeted with two blunt messages that Bruce Labay put up at his oil field services business. One declared that Mr. Labay was tired of softhearted Republicans, though he used a more colorful adjective. The other read, “We Need More Republicans Like Ted Cruz.”…

“I was proud of him,” Mr. Labay said of the state’s junior senator. “I was proud he was a Texan. I wish they would have held firm, and we’d still be shut down.”…

Mr. Cruz, for one, said his Texas support has been uplifting. “The many supportive letters, e-mails, calls and social media comments we’ve received from Texans since Labor Day have been inspirational,” he said in a statement. “Hearing from constituents keeps me focused on the concerns of the people I work for and the issues I ran on. That’s what matters.”…

“Texas likes a fighter,” Mr. Patrick said. “He’s only been there 10 months, but he’s proven to be a fighter. If our party doesn’t lead as a bold conservative party, then we will disappear as a party.”

***

Cruz’s donors say they’re pleased with their investment in the senator who made killing the health-care law an integral piece of his 2012 campaign and who on Oct. 16 panned the budget and debt-ceiling deal because it didn’t gut the law. “He’s doing what he said he would do, and he’s not trying to make friends with Democrats or Republicans,” says donor Dougal Cameron, who owns Cameron Management, a real estate development firm in Houston. “He’s trying to represent the people who sent him up there.”…

Cruz doesn’t owe his seat to the business community. It was the financial muscle of the Tea Party that propelled the 42-year-old lawyer to victory last year over the Republican Party’s establishment candidate, Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst. Cruz’s top donors were two Washington-based activist groups, Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

While Cornyn, the Senate Minority Whip, has railed against the health-care law like others in his party, he wasn’t as insistent as Cruz about defunding it as a condition for keeping the government open. “Ted Cruz doesn’t have to bow down to anybody,” says Anthony Holm, a Texas GOP strategist who advised Houston homebuilder Bob Perry, the state’s most generous Republican donor before he died this year. “The big Texas donors sat out. As a result, they and establishment powers are in a very weak position to influence his efforts now.”

***

The Republican establishment despises Ted Cruz. And that’s great news for the senator from Texas: It’s the most prominent sign that he’s the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination…

“There’s a sense that we played it their way two straight campaign seasons for president, and we’re not going to do that again,” said John Brabender, who served as the chief strategist for Rick Santorum’s second-place presidential campaign last year. “There is an angry, take-no-prisoner conservative out there saying, ‘Look, we’re tired of negotiating, we’re tired of compromising.’”…

Carney added: “His scorn by the media and the establishment and Capitol Hill staff is just making him stronger. He comes across as a breath of fresh air.”…

“What’s happened, the opposition, the Left, and the establishment of the Republican Party has elevated Ted Cruz to an unprecedented level if he chooses to run in 2016,” said Vander Plaats. “I really believe if the Iowa caucuses were held today, I don’t even think it’d be close. Ted Cruz would walk away with it.”

***

I appeared on NPR on Wednesday and was surprised to hear a caller say that Sen. Ted Cruz should be charged with sedition. “I’m really baffled by the fact that the discussion has not ever reached the point where charges of sedition should be brought up against him for conspiring and bullying others to work with him to undermine the American economy … full faith and credit,” the caller said. “He’s done so much damage to the standing of the United States in the world. And if you read the Sedition Act, it seems like it really applies.”…

After Cruz and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appeared together last weekend on the National Mall, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported the event in front of a screen with pictures of Cruz and Palin and the title LATEST SEDITION. Maddow did not utter the word itself, but viewers certainly got the message.

On the activist website MoveOn.org, there are multiple petitions calling for Cruz and others to be charged with sedition. In one, the petition writer adopted a very broad and somewhat fuzzy standard under which Cruz should be sent to jail: “Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order,” the petition says. “Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Sedition is the stirring up of rebellion against the government in power.” Another petition adds “insurrection” to Cruz’s indictment.

***

Reid said that in his 30 years in Congress, he could not recall a senator meddling so much in House affairs.

“Ted Cruz, well, he proved he has a great fundraising operation,” Reid said. “But you don’t have to have Harry Reid criticizing him. Republicans criticized him. What do you think that vote was last night from Republicans? That was a message to Ted Cruz: ‘What the hell are you doing?’… He is a laughing stock to everybody but him. What has he accomplished other than raising some money for president? And if this man can get the nomination to be the Republican nominee for president, I pity the Republican Party.

“Ted Cruz is smart,” Reid added. “He has always been able to talk down to people. He is now in the Senate. People are as smart as he is. He can’t talk down to anyone anymore. But he has still not accepted that in his own head. He still thinks he’s smarter than everybody else. He might be able to work a calculus problem better than I can. But he can’t legislate better than I can.”

***

Cruz comes off as smarter than all of the above combined. There’s a reason so many outside the Beltway admire him. To those who feel jilted by the system and insulted by critics, he is a vision of palm trees, dates and fountains. He articulates what they think and feel and, as a bonus, he’s got that Latino thing.

But Cruz is a mirage, an idea conjured in a fantasy that can’t be realized in reality. Like many successful politicians (and narcissists), he reflects back to others their own projected needs and desires. But then reality sets in — the debt-crisis deadline looms, or the defunding ruse is exposed as theater — and only dust and dung remain among the shards of mirrored glass.

To the most important point, the crux of Cruz: The only person who loves Ted Cruz more than Ted Cruz is Barack Obama. It is the White House and Democrats, not Republicans, who have advanced the idea that Cruz is the face of the GOP. Remember when the White House insisted that Rush Limbaugh was the leader of the GOP? These narratives are useful to Democrats because they loonify the GOP, driving voters away from their fiery rhetoric just as intense heat repels any sensible mammal…

The only hope for Republicans going forward is that Cruz resists the allure of his own voice.

***

It’s striking how much the Tea Party wing of the G.O.P. has adopted the tactics of the P.O.G. — “Party of God” — better known as Hezbollah…

The Tea Party is not a terrorist group. It has legitimate concerns about debt, jobs and Obamacare. But what was not legitimate was the line it crossed. Rather than persuading a majority of Americans that its policies were right, and winning elections to enact the changes it sought — the essence of our democratic system — the Tea Party threatened to undermine our nation’s credit rating if the Democrats would not agree to defund Obamacare. Had such strong-arm tactics worked, it would have meant that constitutionally enacted laws could be nullified if determined minorities opposed them. It would have meant Lebanon on the Potomac.

Which brings up one last parallel: Hezbollah started a war against Israel in 2006, without knowing how to end it. It didn’t matter whether it won or lost. All that mattered was that it “resisted the Zionists.” Hezbollah’s tacit motto was: “I resist, therefore I am.” Early in that 2006 war, Nasrallah boasted of Hezbollah’s “strategic and historical victory,” by holding Israel to a draw. But, in the end, the Israeli Army dealt a devastating blow to Hezbollah’s neighborhoods and Lebanon’s infrastructure. After the smoke cleared, Nasrallah admitted that it was a mistake.

The Tea Party started this war on Obamacare with no chance of success and no idea how to end it — similarly intoxicated by a self-image of heroic “resistance.” And just like Nasrallah, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas engaged in magical thinking, declaring that the House vote to defund Obamacare — although rejected by the Senate — was “a remarkable victory.” But most of his Republican colleagues aren’t buying it. They see only ruin.

***

But the tea party has a lot to learn, and quickly. “It’s not enough to feel, you need strategy. They need better leadership, not people interested in money, power and fame. Public service requires sacrifice. I see too many self-seekers there…

Most important? “I don’t like saying this but be less gullible. Many of your instincts are right but politics is drowning in money. A lot of it is spent trying to manipulate you, by people who claim to be sincere, who say they’re the only honest guy in the room. Don’t be the fool of radio stars who rev you up for a living. They’re doing it for ratings. Stop being taken in by senators who fund-raise off your anger. It’s good you’re indignant, but they use consultants to keep picking at the scab, not to move the ball forward, sorry to mix metaphors. And know your neighbors: Are they going to elect a woman who has to explain she isn’t a witch, or a guy who talks about ‘legitimate rape’? You’ll forgive politicians who are right in other areas, but your neighbors and the media will not. Get smart about this. Don’t let the media keep killing your guys in the field. Make it hard for them. Enter primaries soberly. When you have to take out an establishment man, do. But if you don’t, stick with him but stiffen his spine.”…

Ted Cruz? Here Taft paused. “That fellow is a little self-propelled.” Another pause. “We had a saying, ‘Give him time and space to fall on his face.’” Others with him on the Hill, however, are “good, smart, intend to make America better, and will be a big part of the future.”

***

“Unfortunately, rather than supporting House Republicans, a significant number of Senate Republicans actively, aggressively, and vocally led the effort to defeat House Republicans, to defeat the effort to defund Obamacare,” Cruz says, in an interview with National Review. “Once Senate Republicans did that, it crippled the chances of this effort, and it caused the lousy deal.”

When pressed to cite specific Republican senators who may face primary trouble, Cruz refuses — “I’m not interested in a battle of personalities.” But he strongly urges conservatives to hold those lawmakers “accountable.”…

Cruz knows many Senate Republicans are unlikely to appreciate his advice to conservatives, or his appetite for another showdown early next year. He doesn’t care, though, since he believes his push to stop Obamcare and connect the party to disenchanted voters beyond the Beltway is critical to the GOP’s future success. “That transformation, shifting the power from the closed rooms in Washington, from the lobbyists and monied interests on K Street, and back to the American people, is the most important fight,” he says.

***

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Via the Daily Rushbo.

Tags: compromise, conservative, defund, filibuster, ObamaCare, republican, Tea Party, Ted Cruz, Texas

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Rubio:We’llwinonObamaCareinthelong

Rubio: We’ll win on ObamaCare in the long run, because it’s unsustainable

posted at 12:41 pm on October 17, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

True, but this also prompts the question of why the GOP decided to shut down the government in a futile attempt to dislodge Democrats in the Senate and Barack Obama from their dream legislation.  As Marco Rubio says, it’s going to collapse of its own weight, and probably a lot sooner than anyone expected.  Why not force Democrats to vote down a delay — we already had 39 repeals on the record that Democrats ignored — and set the markers for the 2014 election?

It’s water under the bridge now, and Rubio wants to cheer up the troops:

We have missed a golden opportunity to do something about it. But we haven’t given up the fight. The one thing I want people to understand is: They should not feel depressed about this or discouraged about the long term of it. We are going to prevail on this issue. It is just a matter of time. We will prevail because ObamaCare is going to be a disaster. And it won’t be long before many people in this town will be scrambling to try to fix it.

How so? Well, Gabriel Malor points out that the exchange itself is a disaster that will keep lots of people from complying with the law, and will badly miss the White House’s own expectations:

Obama Admin predicted that 494,620 people would sign up for health insurance by Oct 31. http://t.co/BkrWs38eer We're at ~36,000.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) October 17, 2013

In the memo, officials estimated that 494,620 people would sign up for health insurance under the program by Oct. 31. And that was portrayed as a slow start.

“We expect enrollment in the initial months to be low,” said the memo titled “Projected Monthly Enrollment Targets for Health Insurance Marketplaces in 2014.”

A big jump was expected after Thanksgiving, since Dec. 15 is the last day people can sign up so their coverage will take effect Jan. 1. Starting in the new year, the health care law requires virtually all Americans to have insurance or face fines. At the same time, insurance companies will be forbidden from turning away people in poor health.

That’s just the mechanism, which is bad enough.  Worse yet for Democrats — and as we’ve discussed for years at Hot Air — the voters who will get skewered the worst are those in the big progressive demographic of twenty-somethings.  Heritage unveiled a study yesterday that shows, unsurprisingly, that the young workers will carry twice the burden while getting nearly nothing from the benefits:

The Obama Administration is desperate for younger people to enroll to prevent an adverse selection death spiral. As pointed out by Sam Cappellanti at the American Action Forum, “The enrollment of these low cost young adults…is essential as they are required to subsidize the costs of insuring the elderly and chronically ill.”[6] However, young adults face a penalty for not enrolling that is projected to be far less than the insurance coverage they could receive.

Our findings confirm that younger populations see larger percentage increases in premiums. A state that exhibits this clearly is Vermont, where the increase for 27-year-olds is 144 percent and the increase for 50-year-olds is still 60 percent, but far less. All states exhibit this relationship.

Many individuals will experience sticker shock when shopping on the exchanges. It is clear that many policies and cross-subsidization within Obamacare will lead to upward shifts in premiums. These policies include the health insurance tax, essential health benefit and actuarial value regulations, less allowed age variability in premiums, community rating, and guaranteed issue.[7] However, real uncertainty, amidst a rocky start, surrounds what enrollment will look like in the exchanges.

Obamacare will leave many people paying more for their health insurance. The healthcare.gov website is learning to crawl, with additional data trickling in. However, based on information already released by HHS, states, and insurance plans, the claims of savings on premiums for the average participant is a fantasy.

Kevin Glass notes that premiums for this demographic more than double in eleven states.  It’s not much better for 50-year-olds, either.  Only in five states do premiums decline, largely because the ACA replaces worse regulation in those states. The same is true for families of four, although the increases are not as sharp, and the decreases in the five states are all less than 7%.

This kind of sticker shock will be epic, and it won’t just occur at the point of sale.  That’s why my column for The Fiscal Times today on the lessons of the shutdown ends on an optimistic note, too:

4 – Cheer up. Despite the undeniable flop of this strategy and the embarrassment of staging a two-week shutdown with nothing to show for it, it’s not the end of the world for Republicans. By avoiding the debt limit and potentially crossing the Rubicon of a default (and there is considerable doubt as to whether that would actually be the case), the damage to the GOP will be minimal.  The 1996 shutdown did less damage to Republicans than conventional wisdom holds, and in this case the next election won’t have an incumbent President on the top of the ticket.

Instead, the focus can now shift to the disastrous impact of the ACA itself, which voters left in place with their choices in 2012. It’s not just the federal exchange, which will eventually get fixed.  Premiums have skyrocketed . Americans will now have to spend thousands of dollars more on health care whether they receive subsidies on the exchanges or not.  The sticker shock on the premium prices will crescendo over the next few weeks, and the out-of-pocket expense growth will continue all year until the midterm elections.

By that time, it won’t matter whether we had a partial government shutdown for a couple of weeks, or who won or lost this skirmish. What will matter is that the electorate will finally realize that the so-called Affordable Care Act turned out to be anything but affordable, and that nothing will change as long as Democrats remain in charge.  That will give Republicans a chance to incrementally improve their position and prepare for the possibility of a repeal in 2017 – if the coalition on the Right can keep from savaging itself over strategies and tactics in between.

The only path to dismantling ObamaCare is to win elections in 2014 and 2016. That will require the Right to keep its political guns turned outward rather than inward.

Tags: defund, Heritage Foundation, Marco Rubio, ObamaCare, premiums, shutdown, sticker shock

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So,whichnewspaper’sgoingtofilethefirst

So, which newspaper’s going to file the first “WH quietly thinking about delaying ObamaCare” story?

posted at 8:01 pm on October 16, 2013 by Allahpundit

Rest assured, the White House is quietly thinking about delaying ObamaCare. Even if there’s only a five percent chance right now that they end up doing it, the scope of the disaster that is Healthcare.gov means they’ve got to be kicking this idea around in some form. As Megan McArdle explained yesterday, if they can’t iron out the wrinkles by around this time next month, they’ll be risking total chaos next year — a huge backlog of data to process, people trying to use coverage when they haven’t properly enrolled yet, and a huge pool of healthy uninsured young adults whom they need to fund this boondoggle having given up trying to enroll on the feds’ Chernobyl-esque website.

So yeah, they’re thinking about it. Who’ll be the first to find a source up the chain who’s willing to say so to a reporter?

My guess is that we'll soon read stories reporting that, as the funding/debt drama played out on Capitol Hill…

— Byron York (@ByronYork) October 15, 2013

Worries inside the Obamacare bureaucracy were turning to panic, with fear that system failure could make first-year functioning impossible…

— Byron York (@ByronYork) October 15, 2013

And that failure would have huge effect on insurance industry as whole. Read @asymmetricinfo: http://t.co/CAkeUTajeZ

— Byron York (@ByronYork) October 15, 2013

As noted yesterday, the consolation prize from the shutdown being over is that Obama no longer has to worry about losing face by agreeing to a delay while under fiscal pressure from the GOP. He’ll still resist delaying the law for as long as he can — it’ll be a momentous embarrassment to do so and a foot in the door for the “repeal” crowd — but it’s easier to do it now, on “his own terms,” when he looks like he’s being magnanimous or whatever, than it is while Republicans are making a power play. And no matter how reluctant he is to pull the plug, an abortive rollout will be easier to recover from than forcing the public to go through hell for six months trying to use Healthcare.gov and potentially souring them on the law permanently. That would add fuel to the repeal fire more than delay would. As it is, here’s where we are today:

The federal agency in charge of the exchanges signed agreements this summer with several e-brokers to sell health plans in the 36 states where the feds are running the new individual marketplaces. But the online brokers, eager to tap a new market of people who’ll qualify for federal subsidies, learned shortly before the Oct. 1 launch that they wouldn’t be able to offer exchange plans right away.

The brokers say the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services didn’t act fast enough to let them integrate their websites with the IT systems supporting the federal insurance marketplaces. They hope to get everything linked up with the feds in the coming weeks.

“I think it just comes down to they weren’t ready,” said Michael Mahoney, vice president of consumer marketing for Web broker GoHealth. “Like anybody else, when they realized they weren’t going to be ready with a variety of things, they have to look at circumstances and prioritize.”

I’m as confident as you are that integrating those e-broker systems with the unstable federal data hub will be seamless. This is normally the point in any conservative ObamaCare analysis where the specter of Cloward-Piven appears and some people start claiming this giant failure is all part of the Democratic plan to present single-payer as the deus ex machina that’ll rescue America. Not likely — at least, not until Obama has himself a Democratic Congress again. Besides, like Charles Cooke says, the last thing you’d want to do if you’re trying to engineer a total government takeover of health care is show the public in gruesome detail that … government is really, really incompetent at overseeing health care:

[T]he law remains pretty unpopular. That the government has demonstrated so publicly that it is too incompetent to run what is a glorified comparison website — even when given hundreds of millions of dollars and a three-year lead time — cannot have helped the progressive dream of single-payer one bit. Hopefully, Republicans will have the nous to hammer this home over and over and over again during the next few months. Americans hate the DMV. Obamacare’s exchanges are currentlt worse than the DMV. Free marketeers, who may be tempted instead to talk abstractly about how bad things are in countries that most Americans have never visited – let alone lived in – should capitalize on that.

That’s another reason why O is surely contemplating delaying the law (and secretly wishing he could fire people for botching this so horribly, even though he won’t). The longer he sticks with it, the greater the risk that the whole universal health-care endeavor in all its statist glory will be jeopardized long-term. If Healthcare.gov becomes a punchline among young (and left-leaning) Americans, who knows what that’ll do to the prospects of greater government power over health care later. Some lefties like Joan Walsh have been scoffing on Twitter that the “glitches” mean much of anything, but Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker is closer to the truth, I think: “The ACA is the most important liberal project in decades. If it fails, it is a complete disaster for liberalism.”

Via John Sexton, tick tock.

Tags: defund, delay, healthcare.gov, Individual Mandate, obama, ObamaCare, sebelius, White House

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Key“defund”backer:Let’sberealistic,wecan’t

Key “defund” backer: Let’s be realistic, we can’t repeal ObamaCare until 2017

posted at 1:21 pm on October 16, 2013 by Allahpundit

Via the Corner, it’s Michael Needham of Heritage Action, arguably the single biggest driver of the “defund” effort besides Ted Cruz himself. Question: If repeal is obviously impossible because, after all, Democrats control two-thirds of the lawmaking branches of the government, why wasn’t “defund” also impossible for the same reason? I don’t know. If you’re willing to risk serious political injury to yourself by shutting down the government for weeks to extract a crucially important concession, why lower your ask to “defund” instead of going whole hog for repeal? It’s a matter of not blinking, right?

The answer, I guess, is that “defund” theoretically might have been more appealing to red-state Democrats like Pryor and Begich than the nuclear option of repeal would be. All the defunders were asking for was a year without money for the law, they could argue, not permanent neutralization. Given the problems with Healthcare.gov, who could be against that? Even if the “defund” caucus had won every conservative Democratic vote, though, they still wouldn’t have had nearly enough to pass a “defund” bill over a filibuster staged by the rest of Reid’s caucus. It would have been a fun, fleeting embarrassment for the White House — “Five Dems cross aisle to oppose money for ObamaCare!” — but then, as the shutdown dragged on, those Democrats would have swung back to Reid in partisan solidarity and in the name of showing voters back home that they wanted the shutdown to end ASAP. Beyond that, it was probably unrealistic to expect any Dem, including highly vulnerable ones like Pryor, to vote for any anti-ObamaCare measure, no matter how small. Pryor may come from a red state but his only chance at holding his seat is heavy Democratic turnout and you can imagine how the true believers on the left in Arkansas would have reacted to him knifing them in the back by joining the “defunders.” In fact, if you believe Begich, one of the theoretically gettable votes for the right, no one in a position of power including Cruz ever personally lobbied him to switch sides on defunding. So if “defund” was more likely than repeal, it was more likely in the sense that an 85-yard field goal is more likely than a 90-yard one.

And now here we are:

There are no policy concessions from the Democrats (income verification is already part of Obamacare). There are no procedural concessions from the Democrats. Just the opposite, in fact.

Democrats managed to get the budget conference they’ve been pursuing for six months. They got a CR of the length they wanted and ending before the next sequestration cuts rather than six-month CR that Sen. Susan Collins proposed. They got a debt-ceiling increase all the way into February. This is far beyond what Democrats thought possible on Sept. 30…

Going forward, not only will Republicans be afraid to shut down the government or threaten the debt ceiling again during this Congress, but if Republicans somehow end up doing it anyway, Democrats will be unafraid of the fight. As Democrats see it, if Republicans want to give a shutdown or a default another shot closer to the 2014 election, well, that’s great news for Democratic congressional candidates.

That’s Ezra Klein, but he’s right about the last part. “Defund” was always about using the shutdown as leverage, not so much the debt ceiling, but after this humiliating rout Boehner and McConnell won’t be willing to play chicken with the debt limit again for a long time, if ever. They might as well raise the ceiling for three or four years instead of three or four months. Their bluff’s been called; they’re clearly unwilling to hit the ceiling — rightly so — so there’s no sense pretending anymore. Essentially, this process convinced Democrats that they’re the ones who’ll win if they just Don’t Blink.

Two thoughts in closing. One: Why did Heritage Action oppose Boehner’s final bill yesterday? The bill was, no doubt, a feeble compromise compared to the lofty ambitions of the “defund” movement, but the only alternative at that point was an even lamer Democratic-written bill in the Senate. By opposing Boehner, Heritage all but guaranteed that he wouldn’t have the votes to pass it, which ensured that Reid would dictate the final terms of the settlement. Where’s the logic in that? Two: Does it matter at all that shutting down the government didn’t prevent the funding of ObamaCare? The only way to achieve that was to pass a “defund” bill, which, per the above, was all but impossible from the start. All the shutdown did was freeze a few discretionary parts of the budget; the key appropriations for O-Care aren’t among those parts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in hindsight — having the Healthcare.gov catastrophe start on time and fail epically will do much more to push the White House towards considering delay than the shutdown did. But even that comes with potential bad news: How many low-information voters out there incorrectly believe that it’s the shutdown, not Obama’s and HHS’s incompetence, that’s responsible for the health-care website disaster? Hmmmm.

Tags: debt ceiling, defund, demint, heritage, house, needham, repeal, Senate, shutdown

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