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Title: Republicans should be disgusted with the House Freedom Caucus
Source:
The Washington Examiner
URL Source: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/r ... freedom-caucus/article/2618269
Published: Mar 24, 2017
Author: QUIN HILLYER,
Post Date: 2017-03-28 05:42:24 by Gatlin
Keywords: None
Views: 1000
Comments: 15
Reports from Capitol Hill today indicate ,B>rising exasperation among old-school conservatives about the shifting, raise-the-ante, refuse-to-say-"yes" demands from most members of the House Freedom Caucus, with regard to the upcoming vote on the House Republican healthcare bill. The exasperation is well-justified. The House Freedom Caucus is clearly driven by outside groups such as Heritage Action, which has become such an all-or-nothing, my-way-or-the-highway outfit that it makes Patrick Henry look like a compromising squish. It seems as if every concession made to the Freedom Caucus is met with a new demand. I just returned from a barbecue place in conservative Mobile, Ala., where a longtime Republican activist stopped me and asked: "Are we going to get a health bill? Are these guys in Congress ever going to prove they can govern? Will they ever know when to get to 'yes'? Are we ever going to stop making the perfect the enemy of the good?" This was a conservative stalwart in deep-red Alabama, not a centrist Long Island inheritor – and even he was disgusted by the House Freedom Caucus' behavior. The House leadership's original bill contained a lot of good features but doubtless left much to be desired. Its policy mix was poorly cobbled together; the political groundwork for it was nearly non-existent; and the public relations surrounding its release was slow, muted and confused. But since then, the Trump White House and the leadership team have made yeomen's efforts to improve the bill. They have listened, reconsidered, adjusted and reworked a number of provisions — especially by encouraging block grants and work requirements for Medicaid. But the House Freedom Caucus leaders and their outside pressure groups have refused to get on board even to keep alive what surely will be the only vehicle to replace Obamacare that will come up this year. They have no respect for the reality that the budget "reconciliation" rules do indeed put real parameters on what can be included in such legislation with just 51 votes. They show no memory of how the only reason the whole of Obamacare passed in 2010 was because the Senate did meet a 60-vote threshold on Christmas Eve of 2009 and then used that vote as pretext for claiming reconciliation rules either already had been met or else no longer applied — and thus that Democrats then had an advantage Republicans do not enjoy right now. They show no understanding that whatever they vote on in the House will absolutely be altered in the Senate and that they in the House will, therefore, get another chance to vote yea or nay on final passage. In effect, the first floor vote in the House amounts, de facto if not de jure, to a procedural vote. Without this vote, they absolutely will not be able to meet their campaign pledges to replace Obamacare. And they will make the Republican Congress and the new White House look hopelessly inept, destroy any political momentum from the election, explode comity within the House and Senate Republican caucuses, and badly hobble the entire conservative agenda in a flurry of mutual recriminations. Yes, the whole process should be slowed down once it reaches the Senate. Senators should include House conservatives in behind-the-scenes negotiations as the Senate tries to rework the bill. The final bill should be crafted to fit as much within reconciliation rules as possible, should be accurately scored by the Congressional Budget Office before a vote, should be available for members of Congress and the public to read for a full week before the final vote, and should have parts that actually fit together rather than working at cross-purposes. Yet all of this is best done in the Senate. Only the Senate really can determine how much to squeeze within its own peculiar reconciliation rules. Only the Senate can determine how conservative a bill can be without losing just three of 52 Republican members. Yet the House Freedom Caucus won't budge. It won't accept the Madisonian design of the constitutional system which makes ideological purity in legislation a near-impossibility. It just issues ultimatums, promising the political guillotine to anybody who won't toe their ideological hard line. The group should rename itself. It's not acting like a Freedom Caucus, but like a Jacobin Chorus. If it doesn't wise up, it may be reminded that revolutions tend to eat their own.
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#1. To: Gatlin (#0)
Republicans campaigned for EIGHT YEARS, four consecutive election cycles, on repealing Obamacare if they were given power. They were given power, in spades! Both houses of Congress, the White House, very soon, the Supreme Court. They have NO EXCUSE. They are trying make excuses. They "wanted" to make the change through reconciliation. Why? To avoid a filibuster. But they can strike down the filibuster rule any time they want to. Harry Reid showed us how. They don't WANT to. Which means, in the end, they don't WANT to strike down Obamacare. Republicans get huge contributions from financiers, and insurance companies are the biggest financiers of all. The insurance companies WANT a mandated health care program. They want it to be more profitable to them, and have everybody trapped. And THAT is what Ryan was going for. Problem is, what Ryan and the Republicans proposed broke eight years of promises with the American people. We did not elect you to TINKER WITH Obamacare and tell us "You can't repeal it, because...reconciliation! (Yeah, that's the ticket)" We elected you to REPEAL Obamacare, LIKE YOU PROMISED. You Republicans tried to pull something over on the American people again. You are as stupid and evil as the 16 dwarves who stood up there on the stage with Trump. You have the majority because of Trump, and because Hillary was especially unacceptable. And you've proceeded, in your FIRST major legislative act, to be the lying turds we always knew you were. Republicans are disgusting. They have no honor. They still have power. They could LEARN from their experience here, stop being dishonest cunts and DO WHAT THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO DO, which is REPEAL OBAMACARE. That's going to mean imposing discipline in the Senate, in particular. They don't want to. So they won't. They're going to be what they always have been: the party of the crony capitalist rich. They're not going to use the power the people gave them to do what they promised. And as a result, they are going to get slaughtered in the mid-term election. If Trump can't make them do what he was elected to do, he'll be a one-term President. And then you'll have Democrats with all the power in a few short years. And THEY reliably do what they promise to do. So, if you Republicans don't LIKE what Democrats will do with plenary power, stop trying to weasel out of your promises, stop being lying cunts, look down into that open grave at your feet and understand that we, the people, will push you into it just as we pushed in Hillary. REPEAL OBAMACARE. If that means you have to override the filibuster rule, then DO IT. Or politically die. Two choices. Get what YOU want but we didn't vote for? You will never get that again: we are onto you lying sacks of shit. Shut up and do the people's will, not your own.
Trump and the Republicans, Business as Usual So far, Trump and the republicans are following perfect form: House Republicans abandoned their efforts to repeal and partially replace Obamacare after President Donald Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan couldn’t wrangle enough votes…. It strikes me that Obama is more capable than Trump and Pelosi is more capable than Ryan; at least when Obama and Pelosi had a majority in both houses of congress, they could ramrod an unpopular bill through. Why did it fail? I will answer the question with a question: who in the electorate voted for “replace”? The voters for Trump wanted “repeal.” Republicans, when not in power, proposed a repeal bill at least half-a-dozen times. Why not now? Many republicans in congress wanted either repeal or a different version of replace. If Trump and Ryan truly wanted a win, they should have called for a straight-up “repeal” vote. The base would have been thrilled; republicans who voted against this would have been kicked out of office in two years; Trump would have delivered what his voters expected. Instead we get one of the only two allowable outcomes in US politics: business as usual or business worse than usual. This is laughable. "Prove they can govern", "when to get to yes", "make the perfect the enemy of the good"? These are just the same talking points echoed around the Beltway. Hillyer is making stuff up. There is no such person in Mobile, AL. And Quinn Hillyer is not famous enough to be recognized in a barbecue place in that town (or any other). This is #FakeNews. My goodness, they spent all of two weeks plotting among themselves to revamp 1/6th of the economy while refusing to hold hearings or allow amendments, ending with Trump coming to the Hill to make threats while Bannon came down to tell GOP conservatives "This is not a debate; you have no choice". Trump and Ryan are entirely to blame for this debacle. And Hillyer manufacturing transparently #FakeNews doesn't actually help them. Or his career.
REPEAL OBAMACARE. If that means you have to override the filibuster rule, then DO IT. It is tiresome to hear these constant lame-ass excuses. Give us the House, give us the Senate, give us the WH, oops, those darned conservatives are blocking us because they actually believed we were serious about repealing 0care all along. If they don't repeal 0care first as they have promised to do for six years in seven different attempts, I'd prefer that the Freedom Caucus refuse to help them pass tax reform or an infrastructure bill.
Absolutely. "Infrastructure" was a Trump pom-pom, tolerable pork as a reward (giving him a popularity boost) for the hard changes he was to do. But without those changes (like killing Obamacare, changing trade in America's favor) it's just a massive new expenditure program to increase the debt and buy votes for Republicans. Nope. Tax "reform" that includes eliminating estate taxes and other taxes on the rich, while leaving middle class taxes proportionately higher, is not tax reform. It's crony capitalism, and it should be defeated.
Particularly when you see the oncoming debt/entitlement crisis. Completely irresponsible. And it is not enough of an excuse merely to say, "Dems are worse". If the GOP won't stop it, then we default to the usual slower speed of the Dems wrecking the country with immoral policy and irresponsible governance. If the GOP won't stand up to it and put a stop to it, I'd prefer we just get it over with and stop fighting. The GOP is looking like a gutless "Great White Hope" that won't even lift its fists to fight. And where is your "Trump Fights" these days? Trump barely did anything to fight for this rotten healthcare bill. He went down to the House once to threaten them, sent Bannon down to browbeat them, held a handful of meetings at the WH and devoted all of 17 legislative days to revamping the American economy. Then he announces that any attempt to repeal 0bamaCare was over. Was that the big fight that Trump was supposed to stage? He campaigned at every stop to repeal 0bamaCare. The wall, bringing back jobs, eliminating regulation, none were peddled any harder than repealing 0bamaCare. Where's all the fight that Trump was supposed to have in him, just waiting to unleash on that dirty Swamp?
Obamacare was a Republican issue, not HIS issue. HIS issues are: (1) The Wall. (2) Fair trade, not "Free" trade. (3) Peace with Russia. Those are his signature issues, the red meat that got him the Midwest, and that got him my vote. Obamacare was a legacy issue. I ALWAYS blamed the Republicans for offering no plan at all, going all the way back to when Obama launched the need. Our health care system was broken 8 years ago. It needed to be fixed. And to it right, it needed bipartisanship. But Republicans were hellbent on having NO federal health insurance plan - just nothing. So the Democrats put together what they could force through. And it wasn't good. Now it's failing. The pols say that the Democrats "own" it, but I've said since the beginning that both parties own it, because health care is an irreducible necessity, and it should have been responsibly handled by both since the very beginning. It was not. When Republicans whine about Democrats, I don't listen because I don't care. I see the Republicans as endlessly special pleading for the rich, and had Donald Trump not been the man on the ticket, I would not have cared whether some Republican like Yeb! won, or Hillary. I do not see the Republicans as a lesser evil. I see the Democrats as the lesser evil, because they, at least, have social programs and we need those. The Republicans are the ones always trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. When there was a Cold War, we had to resist the USSR. I do not favor the false Cold War of today. It's asinine. We don't need to "stand up to Russia". We need to stand down and stop causing tension in Europe.
You're really just a Democrat who is squishy about abortion. I see a lot of that actually even among supposed conservatives.
No.. You've said that before, but it is simply not true. I am a Catholic. This means that certain things - care for the poor, the sick, the old, the orphan, the education of children - regardless of the means to pay - is central to my beliefs about social policy. That does not mean that I support teachers union aggressiveness, or all of the various ways that the Democrats use the requirement of social structure to feather their nests and create political power. I oppose all of that, all the while insisting on the necessity of redistributive social welfare. To me it is not a matter of social "justice", because poverty and suffering are part of the human condition, not the FAULT of some political party or ideology. These are permanent human ills, and they require permanent human effort and expenditure. I ioppose the Democrats hijacking the issue to create political power, and then using the budgets for social relief to, instead, create union edifices that help Democrat cronies, but not the old, the sick, the poor, the orphan, children in general. That Democrats hate babies and murder them by the millions shows where their souls are. And that's in a very different place from mine. Now, it is true, that as a Catholic I am a statist. I recognize that when God set up a state the one time he did it, in ancient Israel, he set up a mandatory system of wealth redistribution through tithes and through debt forgiveness laws, the requirement to lend, the inability to enslave for debt, and the prohibition on charging interest to the fellow faithful. God had a comprehensive system of welfare aimed at requiring his people to take care of each other (whether they wanted to or not). I recognize that God did this because people will never voluntarily give ENOUGH to really cover the need. They have to be coerced to give MORE than they want to. God coerced them in Israel, and the power of elected government in a democracy, or the king in a monarchy, ought to do the same thing. This is where the Republicans and I part ways. They insist that poverty relief should be private and mandatory. But I say that never has worked and never will, that it is not the system that God himself set up, and that the suffering is too great to try that failed experiment again. So, I recognize that the state must of necessity be much larger and more redistributive than Republicans want, but this does not make me a Democrat, because I oppose the Democrat use of power to redistribute wealth and authority to their cronies, while the real poor and suffering only get crumbs. I oppose both parties on different bases. The Republicans love mammon more than Christ's commandments, and the Democrats are not only not Christian (they murder babies), but they take the money that is earmarked for poverty relief and instead spend it on bureaucrats. Democrat conniving with Communists during the Cold War was treasonous. The Republican desire to extend the Cold War a quarter century past its sell by date is irresponsible. Your mind works in a simplistic, binary fashion. To you, if one is not a Republican, if one does not support your ideas of economics, then one is a Democrat. That's silly. The Democrat party has been around since Andrew Jackson. Catholicism has been around since Jesus Christ, and Catholic economics have been around since Moses. I hold to an economic belief system that was revealed directly by God four thousand years ago. I recognize that Republicans do not actually know or understand God's Law of money, but unlike you, I don't therefore accuse Republicans of being non-Christians, I merely state that they are deluded. When they double down on their error, I snarl at them because they deserve it. This does not make me a Democrat. You need to let your mind grow up on this. You're not a young man, but your binary political reasoning, accusing me of being a Democrat, is the thinking of a teeenager, not a 60 year old man.
No, I think my observation is pretty accurate. You never stop posting your admiration for Dems in social and fiscal policy and for their Big Government policies. You make excuses for everything they do. I'm not sure why it bothers you that I accurately perceive that you are a Democrat.
You are inaccurate. I've voted for one Democrat in my life - one - the Congressman who appointed me to Annapolis. I did not vote for Democrats in the 1980s because they wanted to cave to the Soviet Union. I would not vote for Democrats today because they want to let my country be overrun by illegals, to change the electorate so they can win. Democrats sympathize with Islam - I recognize Islam as evil. Democrats are for big government unions. I don't think that government workers should be allowed to unionize at all. Democrats are for taking God out of the public square. I want God, the real God, the Catholic God, front and center. Democrat liberals see everything in terms of race, and believe that power should derive from race, I believe that we are all cousins, from common fathers, and a common Father, long ago. Democrats oppose the private ownership of firearms. I like the 2nd Amendment. Democrats and Republicans both love free trade with China. I don't. My probably with Republicans is that they are crony capitalists who worship money, and that ends up causing tremendous hardship for many. Also, they deceive the faithful, by pretending to be what they are not. Also, frankly, there are a great number of evil bigots in the Fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party who hate Catholics. The Democrat Party has generally been for social welfare, which is a very Catholic thing. So your whole binary "You criticize the Republicans so you're a Democrat" business is shallow and silly. The Freedom Caucus are Republicans, even though they just broke the Republicans' reputation and delivered a setback to the President. You demand a sort of lockstep. Believe me, if I were a Democrat, I would say that I was. But I'm not. I just don't hate them the way that you do.
No, it isn't. You post nothing but contempt for Republicans and have done so for many years. You post nothing but admiration for Democrats (except abortion) and have done so for many years. You just seem offended that I accurately noticed your habits. I'm not sure why.
If it's not silly, then it is unwise. I am not even close to being a Democrat, and I don't support them or have any particular sympathy. Which means that the Republicans, the Right, are more likely to get my vote. But I have ceased being an outright Republican BECAUSE you guys seem to have your heads screwed on with bolts. My concerns are real, and moral - rooted in traditional Christianity, not in Leftist ideology. But if you guys on the right are incapable of distinguishing traditional Christiann concerns about charity from the Democrats, your tin ear wii lose you vital allies.
You support all the Dem policies except abortion (and maybe sodomy marriage). You oppose all the GOP policies except abortion. I am correct. You're just a Democrat who is squeamish about abortion.
I support broad, comprehensive social welfare because human needs require it. That is Catholic Christian, not Democrat. The problem you Republicans have is that you love money and the powerful so much you abandon Christ, and leave the Democrats completely in possession of the field. Their motives are frequently wrong, their methods are squirrely and sometimes murderous. But you Republicans propose nothing in return other than starvation and suffering for half the population. The Democrats' solution is Marx, which sucks. But you Republicans' solution is Malthus, which is worse. Democrats are assholes. Republicans are assholes who claim to be Christian and therefore ought to know better. You call me a Democrat who is squeamish about abortion, but I am. Catholic who dislikes both parties. You Republicans call yourselves Christians, but I see followers of Ayn Rand, not Christ, who are a bit squeamish about abortion. You economic policies are anti-Christian.
#2. To: Gatlin (#0)
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.
#3. To: Gatlin (#0)
(Edited)
I just returned from a barbecue place in conservative Mobile, Ala., where a longtime Republican activist stopped me and asked: "Are we going to get a health bill? Are these guys in Congress ever going to prove they can govern? Will they ever know when to get to 'yes'? Are we ever going to stop making the perfect the enemy of the good?"
The House leadership's original bill contained a lot of good features but doubtless left much to be desired. Its policy mix was poorly cobbled together; the political groundwork for it was nearly non-existent; and the public relations surrounding its release was slow, muted and confused. But since then, the Trump White House and the leadership team have made yeomen's efforts to improve the bill.
#4. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
So, if you Republicans don't LIKE what Democrats will do with plenary power, stop trying to weasel out of your promises, stop being lying cunts, look down into that open grave at your feet and understand that we, the people, will push you into it just as we pushed in Hillary.
#5. To: Tooconservative (#4)
If they don't repeal 0care first as they have promised to do for six years in seven different attempts, I'd prefer that the Freedom Caucus refuse to help them pass tax reform or an infrastructure bill.
#6. To: Vicomte13 (#5)
Tax "reform" that includes eliminating estate taxes and other taxes on the rich, while leaving middle class taxes proportionately higher, is not tax reform. It's crony capitalism, and it should be defeated.
#7. To: Tooconservative (#6)
Where's all the fight that Trump was supposed to have in him, just waiting to unleash on that dirty Swamp?
#8. To: Vicomte13 (#7)
#9. To: Tooconservative (#8)
You're really just a Democrat who is squishy about abortion. I see a lot of that actually even among supposed conservatives.
#10. To: Vicomte13 (#9)
This does not make me a Democrat.
#11. To: Tooconservative (#10)
'm not sure why it bothers you that I accurately perceive that you are a Democrat.
#12. To: Vicomte13 (#11)
So your whole binary "You criticize the Republicans so you're a Democrat" business is shallow and silly.
#13. To: Tooconservative (#12)
#14. To: Vicomte13 (#13)
I am not even close to being a Democrat, and I don't support them or have any particular sympathy.
#15. To: Tooconservative (#14)
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