At least some Republicans are honest about not wanting to repeal Obamacare

Source: Conservative Review | March 28, 2017 | Daniel Horowitz

Earlier today, a couple of Republican officials, in a refreshing display of honesty, admitted what we have known all along: They don’t want to repeal Obamacare. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R,Ky.) admitted there won’t be another attempt:

He’s certainly come a long way from his 2014 campaign promise to repeal Obamacare “root and branch” and his 2013 CPAC speech in which he said “anybody who thinks we’ve moved beyond it is dead wrong.”

As we explained yesterday, the compromise solution for repealing the core of Obamacare (but not quite all of it) is already on the table, and Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has already agreed to and campaigned on it. Why aren’t they doing it? Because they don’t want to repeal Obamacare and never intended to. As early as 2014, the Chamber of Commerce made it clear that their official position was to fix, not repeal Obamacare. Money talks, everything else from there walks.

This sentiment was evident today when Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the Senate majority whip, said that they will no longer pursue repeal of Obamacare through budget reconciliation and that “it needs to be done on a bipartisan basis, and so we’re happy to work on it with Democrats if we can find any who are willing to do so.”

There you have it, folks. They know darn well there are no Democrats who will ever have incentive to work with them to repeal Obamacare. They have always known that this had to be done unilaterally either through reconciliation or by blowing up the filibuster. But Republicans never intended to do so. That’s why we heard all these phony excuses about process limitations. Now that they are proven false, Cornyn is at least being honest by saying they will repeal it when Democrats help them. When hell freezes over …

……

There are two viable options on the table that will demonstrate who actually wants to fulfill the promise to repeal Obamacare. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) has filed a discharge petition to get a floor vote on his simple one-sentence repeal bill. A discharge petition requires 218 members in order to bypass the committee process and force a floor vote, but it will place members on record when it actually matters. Alternatively, the Freedom Caucus leadership has already put out a compromise plan that would leave some elements of Medicaid expansion and subsidies, and create funding for high risk pools so long as all of the Obamacare regulations are repealed. Any member who believes that this is “purist” lied to their constituents when they promised full repeal. Nothing more, nothing less.

At its core, this is not about health care. This is about a party that stands for nothing more than being slightly different from Democrats, and uses Democrat policies — no matter how destructive, immoral, and costly — as the legitimate baseline for their beliefs. They have no standalone affirmative beliefs beyond the Democrat baseline. This is the logical result of the mentality of voting for the lesser of two evils. We never move beyond the evil.

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