Repealing Obamacare: again

YouTube: Right Side Broadcasting

Following President Trumps’s brief speech today (above) in a last-ditch effort to get the Uniparty RINOs to keep their promise to repeal Obamacare, it’s timely to review a couple of reasons why Congress should repeal:

• Medicare is not the answer. Here is today’s horror story about a 91-year old needing treatment but getting rejected by the system.
• Single-payer systems put the state, not the individual in charge of medical decisions. Here’s Mr. Vodkapundit (Stephen Green) on the final chapter in little Baby Gard’s life, and the tragic situation with his parents.

Yet Congress is so used to end-running rules, breaking campaign promises, and disregarding their constituencies that it will be a miracle if they do the right thing on healthcare. How do they keep getting away with it? Here’s an essay by Angelo M.Codevillaon at the American Greatness blog about what “regular order” in the legislative process is supposed to look like. 

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Cleveland Browns secret weapon

A little off topic but . . .

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What’s wrong with Rob Portman?

cartoon credit: Walt Handelsman

via US News and World Report / The New Orleans Advocate

Scott McKay at The American Spectator asks:

Do Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, and Shelley Moore Capito expect to ever get votes from Republican voters again?

Here’s a question: How long have Republicans been running for federal office on repealing Obamacare, in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s terminology, “Root and branch”?

Answer: since 2010.

. . .

You would figure that with Donald Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, repealing Obamacare would be a no-brainer.

OK, the repeal-and-replace angle could be harder to pull off. That’s understandable. There are lots of different kinds of Republicans, and it might be hard to get all of them to coalesce behind a single federal healthcare policy to replace it. Those of us whose studies of the American public sector have led to an understanding that the less federal healthcare policy there is the healthier the healthcare industry will be have a far simpler solution to that problem, but we are unfortunately not the majority — in the House, Senate or public. That’s a shame, and it’s a symptom of a larger civic disease, but that’s for another column in this space. There will be a replacement for Obamacare, and we can hope it’s less awful than what it stands in for.

But when the Senate version of an Obamacare replacement foundered and McConnell announced the next step would be, early next week, an up-or-down vote for an Obamacare repeal now and the crafting of a replacement as a consensus for one emerges, that’s something an entire GOP caucus can vote for.

Minus Susan Collins, of course; Maine’s quote-unquote Republican Senator wouldn’t vote to repeal Obamacare back in 2015 when McConnell’s majority sent a bill doing just that to then-President Obama’s desk to die. But outside of Collins and Mark Kirk of Illinois, who is no longer in the Senate, the rest of the caucus was on board with the repeal.

And yet Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, and Ohio’s Rob Portman have now joined Collins in announcing they won’t support a repeal when the vote comes up next week.

What is wrong with these people?

Capito laced her announcement with a special bit of arsenic for Republican voters. “I didn’t come to Washington to hurt people,” she said.

No, Senator, apparently you came to Washington to lie to people.

. . .

What’s wrong with these people? My guess in one word: Uniparty. And the rest of Scott McKay's article is here.

Insulting the worms

From Townhall, today's cartoon by Glenn McCoy:

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Trump Rally July 25 in Youngstown

 photo credit: Yahoo

From The Daily Caller [cross-outs and edits mine!!]

President Donald Trump will hold a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, next week as his administration struggles [Congress fails] to follow through on his [GOP campaign] promise[s] to repeal Obamacare.

. . . His rally on July 25 was announced Tuesday by his 2020 re-election campaign. It will be held at 7 p.m. EST at the Covelli Centre. [map here]  

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No repeal of Obamacare, again. Thanks GOP.

art credit: huffington post

The GOP members of Congress who put the repeal of Obamacare to a vote dozens of times during the previous administration [per Treehouse, the Senate considered only defunding Obamacare, not repealing], and the GOP candidates who pledged to repeal Obamacare in order to get elected, were all lying through their teeth. They never dreamed that Trump would be elected and that they’d be put on the spot to make good on their promises. And take a look at the two GOP Senators who just announced their intention to vote no! From the AP :

WASHINGTON (AP) — The latest GOP effort to repeal and replace "Obamacare" was fatally wounded in the Senate Monday night when two more Republican senators announced their opposition to legislation strongly backed by President Donald Trump.

The announcements from Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas left the Republican Party's long-promised efforts to get rid of President Barack Obama's health care legislation reeling. Next steps, if any, were not immediately clear.

Lee and Moran both said they could not support Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's legislation in its current form. They joined GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, both of whom announced their opposition right after McConnell released the bill last Thursday.

McConnell is now at least two votes short in the closely divided Senate and may have to go back to the drawing board or even begin to negotiate with Democrats, a prospect he's threatened but resisted so far.

Some of us had higher hopes for Mike Lee and even Rand Paul. Lesson learned: they are all politicians. And they lie.

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The Russians Are Coming and Fake News

“Whatcha doin’ up on the wall there, Muriel?”

Doro Merande in The Russians Are Coming at Great Big Canvas

Just got back from out-of-town, so blogging has been light. But I did some of my usual web-surfing en route, and one of my regular Sunday stops is at the American Thinker.  ICYMI, Clarice Feldman’s “Clarice’s Pieces” was a good way to sift through some of the Fake News in the MSM. including the seemingly endless obsession with The Russians Are Coming. She references Mr. Belmont Club (Richard Fernandez at PJ Media), Scott McKay at American Spectator, and PowerLine, among others, so if you’re short on time, check out her Sunday articles for quick links to good analyses of phony baloney reports:

the non-stop media promotion of some nefarious scheme between Russia and Trump does not pass even the most cursory forensic examination, proving once again in the age of fake news, you cannot remain a passive consumer of news. You have to bring to each story the good sense and diligence with which you handle your most important personal affairs. . .

Nothing so illustrates why the media has deservedly lost all credibility than its unending, overdone effort to fit any action on the part of the President or those around him into a narrative of Russia somehow colluding with him to defeat Hillary. This week’s take was the short meeting his son held with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower last summer. . . 

You’ll just have to work harder in the face of such ignorance and bias to find out what you need to know.  

Clarice makes it a little bit easier.

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