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Ohio members of Electoral College cast all 18 of their votes this afternoon to formally elect Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence as president and vice president.
None of the electors strayed from the GOP ticket despite protests from some of those who oppose Trump.
Soon they will all be gone: the last participants in the human race's most astonishing, most audacious, most wonderfully inspirational adventure to date.
Gone with them will be the memory of a U.S.A. that could accomplish such marvels, in those last years of heroic national vigor, before we turned our energies to guilt and rancor and divisive social crusades, and to persuading ourselves and each other that in the human sphere, everything is equal to everything else.
John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.
Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress.
Obamacare is dead. Long live ... what? That is unclear. "Vice President-elect Mike Pence said Tuesday that repealing and replacing ObamaCare would be the first item on President-elect Donald Trump's agenda," according to Fox News. Its successor will emerge from a series of discussions soon to take place. "It’ll be the first thing out of the gate. ... He wants the Congress when they convene in early January to take up the task of repealing and replacing ObamaCare first."
One of the possible replacements could be the Health Care Compact if only because the list of those who supported H.J.Res.50 reads like a Who's Who in the incoming administration.
- Indiana (home to VP-elect Pence)
- Alabama (AG-nominee Sessions)
- Georgia (HHS nominee Price)
- Texas (endorsed by Sen. John Cornyn)
- Kansas (proposed and endorsed by Rep. Pompeo and Sec. of State Kris Kobach)
- Oklahoma (endorsed by Sen. James Lankford)
The program that Mother Jones once derided as "a longshot" and pipe-dream of a delusional Tea Party has now come within measurable distance of becoming a serious contender to replace Obamacare.
HHS nominee Tom Price's rhetoric suggests he would have no objections in principle to taking Washington out of the picture. In a quote cited by the Wall Street Journal Price said: “We think it’s important that Washington not be in charge of health care,” the six-term congressman said in an interview this summer. “The problem that I have with Obamacare is that its premise is that Washington knows best.”
Trump and Pence reissued their calls to eliminate barriers to encourage competition between health insurers across state lines, make it easier for Americans to open health savings accounts and block grant Medicaid funds to the states