Update: Health Care Compact

Art credit: granitegrok.com

An update from Jamie Story Kohlmann, Managing Director, Health Care Compact

. . . the Health Care Compact has gained two more co-sponsors in Congressmen Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma and Tom Graves of Georgia. That's two more members of Congress who agree that states should have the option to manage health care themselves and the freedom to opt out of Obamacare and other failed federal programs.

The latest two signers join our lead sponsor, James Lankford (OK), and existing co-sponsors Rob Bishop (UT), Jeff Duncan (SC), and Lynn Westmoreland (GA), all of whom come from states that have already joined the Compact. These six House members are effectively representing their constituents and state legislatures, which have clearly declared that they want freedom from Obamacare.

We have news from the states too. The Health Care Compact is awaiting a House vote in Ohio, and we're hopeful the bill will soon be filed in North Carolina.

But for now, the main story is in Kansas, where the Compact is on the House Floor awaiting debate and approval. Once through the House it will go to the Senate, which has a freedom-loving majority that will likely pass it quickly. If you or any of your friends live in Kansas, please have them reach out to their state legislators to urge passage of the Health Care Compact next week. 

Finally - if you haven't seen it yet, please check out this National Review Online story from Karen Lugo at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It's one of the best articles I've seen about the Health Care Compact. Once you've read it, please share with your friends and encourage them to learn more at www.healthcarecompact.org. 

Remember - the Health Care Compact does not prescribe a solution, but lets each member state design health care solutions that best fit its unique citizens. Just like we don't appreciate the federal government telling states what to do, the Compact doesn't tell member states what to do either. The Compact merely gives states the opportunity to choose health care solutions that are designed closer to home - not in Washington, D.C.

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Follow ObamaCare Delays at Your Peril

Photo credit: wisegeek.com

Anthony Ciani has some good advice at AmericanThinker:

Despite being “the law of the land”, President Obama is telling a lot of people to ignore ObamaCare; but does that absolve you from following it?  The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as ObamaCare, is now in full effect, or it is supposed to be.  To avert certain political disaster for the Democratic Party, Obama has issued, as of March 5, 2014, 20 unilateral executive actions to “delay” ObamaCare mandates and taxes.

The President has the authority to pardon, but he cannot pre-pardon your crimes, just as a priest cannot pre-absolve your uncommitted sins; and just as a priest cannot change the list of sins, Obama cannot change the taxes you owe or the benefits you must provide.  So what could happen if you follow Obama’s “delays” and “waivers” in lieu of the law?

. . .  One of Obama’s unilateral changes was to allow people to keep their existing, non-qualifying insurance plans, but those who do will still owe the taxes, regardless of what Obama says or leads you to believe.

So what might happen if you keep your insurance and forgo your 2014 ObamaCare tax?  Regardless of reason, whether you believed Obama or were civilly disobedient, you failed to pay your taxes; however, the ObamaCare tax is special.  The IRS can neither criminally prosecute you nor seize your property for refusing to pay the mandate tax, but it can place liens on your property and assess penalties, and the IRS can criminally prosecute you and seize your property for failing to pay the penalties for evading the ObamaCare mandate.

These are potentially serious consequences, so if your 2014 tax preparation software omits the ObamaCare tax, complain to the manufacturer.  Find software or a preparer that includes the tax, or prepare the forms yourself.  If the official IRS forms omit the ObamaCare tax, complain to or sue the IRS, and then figure it out on your own.  Whatever you do, determine if you comply, and pay if you do not.

. . . Only the law is meaningful to the courts; they care nothing about unlawful executive decrees.[emphasis added]

Read more here. 

Libertarian candidate for governor bounced from primary

Photo credit: ohiocitizen.org

The Plain Dealer online / Cleveland.com is reporting :

Libertarian candidate for governor, Charlie Earl, 

bounced from primary

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Secretary of State Jon Husted on Friday ruled that signatures on nominating petitions for Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Charlie Earl and his running mate Sherry Clark were invalid and struck their names from the May primary ballot.

Husted also upheld a challenge to the Libertarian’s candidate for attorney general, Stephen Linnabarry, removing him from the ballot.

The decision means the Libertarian Party of Ohio will not have any candidates appearing on the primary ballot in May, although write in candidates for auditor and secretary of state successfully qualified as write-in candidates.

More here.

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CPAC, Phyllis Schlafly, and Immigration

Art credit: libertymusings.com

Katherine Connell at NRO’s The Corner reports alarming disagreement over GOP immigration and amnesty policy:

Two participants in a panel on immigration at CPAC today expressed confidence in their closing statements that Hispanic immigrants will be a source of future votes for the Republican party. “Latino voters are the Reagan Democrats of today,” said Alfonso Aguilar, the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. “I believe that the majority of them can actually be members of CPAC in the future,” concurred the Reverend Luis Cortés Jr.​

The panel was supposed to answer the question: “Can there be meaningful immigration reform without citizenship?”

Derrick Morgan, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, was the only one of four panelists to basically reject the premise of the question, saying that he wasn’t the best person to say whether legalization should include a path to citizenship since he didn’t think that Republicans should be pursuing a policy of comprehensive immigration reform at all right now: “I respectfully disagree with the policy of legalization with or without citizenship,” he said, instead favoring a piecemeal approach, beginning with enforcement. He noted that the current laws are not being enforced so “why would you trust this current administration” to implement a deal?

Aguilar vehemently disagreed: “Conservatives need to address immigration, and they need to do it now,” he said, adding that “our conservative base wants us to lead and legislate” on the issue. Alfonso said that in addition to immigrants doing the “jobs that Americans don’t want,” immigration “creates good-paying jobs for working-class Americans.”

Read the rest here.

Good timing: Here is Phyllis Schlafly warning that “Republicans are ‘fools’ to back ‘any kind of amnesty’.”  Katie McHugh at The Daily Caller reports: 

Eagle Forum president and conservative author Phyllis Schlafly condemned GOP leadership efforts to compromise with Democrats on immigration, telling her audience that Republicans are “fools” to back any kind of deal that includes citizenship for illegal immigrants.

“Republicans are fools to to support any kind of amnesty, or to import foreigners who will support big government and big spending,” she said during a blunt speech at The National Security Action in Washington, D.C. “Why is anyone surprised that three fourths of Hispanics and Asians voted for Obama during the 2012 election? … Sixty-nine percent of immigrants support Obamacare.”

Schlafly cited a battery of polls that drew stark contrasts between Americans and naturalized immigrants — which didn’t include recent legal or illegal immigrants. While 67 percent of native-born Americans cited the Constitution as a higher legal authority than international law, only one third of naturalized citizens believed the same, a Harris poll found.

Immigrants tend to vote Democratic not because they’re withdrawing their support from Republicans until the GOP works with Democrats on immigration reform, but because they benefit from generous social programs, she added. (RELATED: Oregon shifts 4,000 illegal immigrants into Obamacare)

“They’re not for amnesty,” she said. “They’re for the goody handouts of Democratic party… [A]mnesty is suicide for the conservative movement and the Republican party.”

Efforts to grant millions of illegal immigrants citizenship will dilute the pool of labor and drive down wages, hurting recent immigrants and Americans alike, Schlafly said.

“Bringing in more cheap labor is a direct attack on the people they’re amnestying and bringing in,” she said. “Amnesty is a complete betrayal of the people we let in the last few years.”

But Schlafly saved her most scathing remarks for Republican supporters of immigration reform: “Everything they’re saying is just a complete lie.”

Requiring illegals to repay back taxes is “the laugh of the day — a complete farce.”

“Of course the aliens will never learn English before they get amnesty,” while their background checks will be as thorough “as the Boston bombers,’” she added heatedly.

“The immigration bill is a disaster for unemployed, a disaster for people with low wages,” she said. “It’s a disaster that the people coming in will not vote the way we want them to vote, to cut overspending.”

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CTPP Monthly meeting Monday March 10 - 7:30pm

Cleveland Tea Party Patriots

Monthly meeting Monday March 10, 2014 at 7:30pm

Please join us for our monthly meeting Monday March 10, 2014 at 7:30pm.

This will be a very important meeting that will actually be a lead in for our monthly meeting in April in which our guest speaker will be Mr. Tom Kelly who will be speaking in regards to the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) rate increases and how you can help stop them.

In our upcoming meeting we will be discussing and showing how you can start to become an influence in your community, which will be an important first step not only in supporting the efforts of reigning in the abusive and unaccountable NEORSD.

Agenda:

• Tea Party Patriots / National

• 2014 Primary Races

• Influencing Your Community

Please be mindful, the work, organizing and efforts of what we do now, is a direct relation to the results we see in November.  We cannot expect to stop the progressive creep and establishment GOP if people only want to be involved 2 weeks prior to the elections.  

While we deal with upcoming issues, we will continue to preach the mantra of "all politics are local" and how what we do this year all leads up to the 2016 Presidential race.

• Date: Monday 3/10/14
• Time: 7:30pm - 9:00pm
• Location: Crowne Centre Building
• Address: 5005 Rockside Rd Suite #960, Independence, OH  (Map)

NOTE: Enter through the Crowne Centre front or back entrance and take the elevators to the 9th floor.

We look forward to seeing you there! Feel free to bring a friend!

Ted Cruz: "God bless the Tea Party"

The Top 13 Things You Missed 

At Tea Party Patriots' 5 Year Anniversary Event

Tea Party Patriots has a great report on last week's Anniversary event in DC, with Quick Quotes by Mark Levin, Mike Lee, Louie Gohmert, Jenny Beth Martin, Jim Jordan, Michelle Bachmann, Rand Paul, among others. And Sen. Ted Cruz. Just go here. 

States Lining Up to Retake Control of Healthcare

With more and more states looking for ways out of the failed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the Health Care Compact is the one option that not only lets them remove themselves from the chains of the PPACA, but will also give them the fiscal freedom and legislative liberty to address their health care concerns and costs at the state level.

Currently 8 states (UT, TX, OK, MO, IN, AL, SC & GA) have passed the Health Care Compact, and it has been introduced in 9 more states (WA, CO, KS, LA, TN, MI, FL, NH & OH). 

Ohio is hoping to be the ninth state to pass the Health Care Compact, Ohio HB 227 which is making its way through the OH House State & Local Government Committee and will hopefully be on the House Floor for a full vote.

From the Daily Caller --

The states cannot rely on Washington to correct the travesty that is Obamacare. After forty-seven votes to repeal or reform the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Congress has not been able to even hold Health and Human Services (HHS) accountable for the website folly, including over $1 billion spent for federal exchange and data services contract awards.

From the opaque political proceedings, to passage by desperate arm-twisting and bribes, to the exceptions granted favored groups including members of Congress and staff, to the eighteen unilateral, politically expedient White House revisions, to the un-competitively contracted website disaster, the formation and implementation of PPACA has done grave injury to the political process.

Americans are now watching the entire Act collapse under the weight of its own illegitimacy. Obamacare has, thus far, served to discourage Americans from working, vastly expanded the Medicaid entitlement, caused the cancelation of millions of private insurance plans, pledged tax funds to underwrite insurance’s losses, increased premium costs by an average of 41 percent, and distanced doctors from patients.

Jonathan Turley, noted constitutional scholar who generally supports President Obama’s policies has said,

I think many people will come to loathe that they remained silent during this period. . . . I think that many people will look back at this period in history and see nothing but confusion as to why people remained so silent when the president asserted these types of unilateral actions. You have a president who is claiming the right to basically rewrite or ignore or negate federal laws. That is a dangerous thing.

Of course, when Americans think of federal law, this spectacle of harried negotiation and frantic deal-making that produced a 2,700 page reconciliation product called the PPACA “law” was as repugnant as Washington sausage-making gets. Key Senators and Congress-members writing in a pending federal appellate amicus brief called the law “disjointed, confusing, and even self-contradictory,” describing it as a “preliminary draft” that was pushed to preempt the filibuster after the election of Republican Senator Scott Brown.

The American public is well aware that Congress generally did not read the PPACA, nor did members deliberate the terms in reconciliation. Now that we are all “finding out what is in it,” sixty-four percent of Americans polled said that the ACA would not have passed “if we knew then what we know today.”

States seeking a way to defend the constitutional order have signed on to lawsuits challenging the legal foundations upon which Obamacare is rationalized. So far, legal challenges have failed.

There is another way that states may organize to pull healthcare back from Washington: the Healthcare Compact. Eight states have already agreed to join in a compact designed to restore control of medical services and systems to the states. An additional ten states are now actively considering adopting the Compact.

Recently, Congressman James Lankford introduced H.J. Res. 110 to authorize “member states … to implement their own health care systems without interference from federal bureaucrats.”

Interstate compacts between states have been in place since before the nation was formed. They have been used over two hundred times to address regional concerns, settle disputes, and defend state sovereignty. For example, compacts have been utilized to organize emergency management, resolve transportation issues, and establish regulatory consistency. Currently, many states are now participating in twenty-five or more compacts.

The Healthcare Compact simply returns healthcare administration to the states. Comparable to a block grant, this compact would provide for allocation of funds back to the states as currently designated by Washington. The Compact also establishes an advisory Healthcare Commission that would convene to recommend non-binding resolutions, assess healthcare issues, and publish data.

At the very least, Congress is obligated to make good on attempts to repeal Obamacare and should expedite approval of the multistate Healthcare Compact. The grant of congressional consent would uphold constitutionally mandated state police power vesting oversight of “health, safety, and welfare” matters in the states. This sovereign state authority logically includes the regulation of healthcare policy.

The federal government has countered that it has the constitutional power to tax and spend for the general welfare and that universal healthcare is a justifiable federal interest. Indeed, this taxing authority rationale was the basis for Chief Justice Roberts’ legal defense of the individual mandate. However, even a wildly imaginative interpretation of the tax-and-spend power could not be construed to license the capricious federal meddling and legislative tampering now imposed upon the most personal medical affairs of state citizens.

States should not pass on this opportunity to reacquire control of healthcare matters while resolving the question of state sovereignty. Moreover, Congress has a constitutional duty to allow state laboratories of advanced technology, medical innovation, and economic incentive to fix the mess that Washington has made.

Some states like Vermont have already expressed interest in a single payer plan whereas other states might choose a plan based upon Indiana’s successful trial of health savings accounts for government employees. Private organizations have demonstrated great results with cooperative plans that promote individual responsibility and comparative shopping for medical services. Health maintenance organizations like Kaiser Permanente have been able to offer reasonable premiums while featuring preventative programs. States are far better positioned than the federal government best to determine the options that are most efficient and effective.

If entrepreneurial states are given a chance to show that they can do a vastly superior job of providing quality care at competitive cost, they will also restore faith in the American reputation for innovative, reliable, and quality medical care. More importantly, returning healthcare to state management will advance a core American ethic: state dynamism and self-determination.

Karen Lugo is Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Action at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.