Republicans against repeal?

Republicans against repeal?

Oh, geez, this will tick you off. Some Republicans are once again showing their yellow streak. Once adamant about “repeal and replace” of the Obamacare legislation, many are backing off, saying such a thing would be “radical.” Huh? Time to burn up the phone lines. This is from James Antle of The American Spectator.

Well, that didn’t take long. After Democratic supermajorities rammed through their health care bill, Republicans were full of sound and fury about how this injustice will not stand. Even John McCain was on board, telling a television interviewer, “Outside the Beltway the American people are very angry and they don’t like it and we are going to try to repeal this.”

But in the GOP, cooler heads always prevail. What these Republican heads want to cool down is the campaign to repeal the health care takeover. Reports the Associated Press: “Top Republicans are increasingly worried that GOP candidates this fall might be burned by a fire that’s roaring through the conservative base: demand for the repeal of President Barack Obama’s new health care law.”

One of the Republican leadership’s volunteer firefighters is none other than Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who chairs the committee responsible for getting GOP candidates elected to the Senate this fall. Cornyn initially unfurled the “repeal and replace” banner, only to quickly make an exception for the “non-controversial stuff,” such as the ban on preexisting conditions which is unfortunately exactly what necessitates the “controversial stuff” like the individual mandate.

Cornyn was later seen pouring cold water on the idea entirely. Asked by the AP whether he was going to advise Republican senatorial nominees to run on repeal, he said, “Candidates are going to test the winds in their own states… In some places, the health care bill is more popular than others.” Meanwhile, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee doesn’t need a weatherman to tell him where the wind blows: “It’s just not going to happen.”

Republican candidates seeking to join Cornyn and Corker in the club have gotten the memo. Shortly before Obamacare passed, Congressman Mark Kirk — the Republican running to fill Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois — bravely vowed to “lead the effort” to repeal the bill. Now he glumly tells a local newspaper, “Well, we lost.”   Snip –

… One Oliver Garland even counseled that repeal was fundamentally unconservative: “True conservatives are not radicals; they respect tradition and work for stable reform to fix institutions.”

There you have it: Repealing a bill that became law last month is radical. Acquiescing to a decades-long flurry of legislation that effectively repeals the Constitution’s limits on federal power is conservative…

… Republicans campaign on canceling spending programs, shutting down government agencies, and overturning Roe v. Wade. But once safely in office, they tend to leave most liberal handiwork alone…Snip –

If Republicans cannot repeal an unpopular bill where many of the costs are front-loaded, many of the benefits are yet to come, and where the creation of another entitlement is as detrimental to their own partisan self-interest as it is to the nation’s finances, then conservatives cannot count on Republicans to undo very much of what they routinely denounce and campaign against.

The Republican Party will simply be the saucer that cools the Tea Party. Cooler heads will have prevailed — and so will have liberalism.

These people have been in D.C. far too long. They need to get their heads right. This is about the future of the country, and they are still doing the “go along to get along routine.” We need a choice at the polls, that why we must have conservatives who believe in the Constitution in positions of power or we will watch our country descend into an unrecognizable place. One has to wonder if they’ve heard from some big-pocket contributors (businesses?) that actually like the bill because it gets their employees off of their insurance plan. That’s just speculation, but when will the GOP stand up for what’s right? Read it all here: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/04/08/republicans-against-repeal

//

Advertisement