This post was FAXed to Congress October 2nd, with the following preface added in the FAX:
Let me summarize this in one paragraph:
The GOP must quit acting like a bunch of vicious, murderous, bomb tossing terrorists holding this nation hostage, and pass a CLEAN DEBT LIMIT bill to stop this obscene attack on the American people and its legitimate government. No attachments. No requirements. Just a clean bill. And not for just six weeks, but for the next 12 months at least. The American people are sick and tired and disgusted with the GOP, which has become the party of no-nothing hypocrites and blatant, non-stop liars, foaming at the mouth, and in this case all just to PREVENT PEOPLE FROM BUYING INSURANCE IN THE PRIVATE MARKET! They know the ACA will be successful, just as Medicare and Social Security have been, and thus they want to kill it before its value is clear to the American People. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The following is the original text on this blog posted October 1.
I think the quotes from GOP members sum things up nicely in the following article this morning.
I called Todd Young’s (R IN-09) Washington office and gave them a rather firm but polite earful last night, pointing out the sheer lunacy to which the GOP have descended.
Things are not going well for the Republicans, as not only are the polls now against them – 87% disapprove of how Congress is handling its job – but their own members are speaking publicly about what a cluster-f this entire situation has become.
Brett LoGiurato @BrettLoGiurato1m
Wow RT @sahilkapur: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA): “The leadership has been backed into a corner by the lemmings” in the GOP.Suzy Khimm@SuzyKhimm2m
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) calls the Cruz wing of party “lemmings with suicide vests…because jumping to your death is not enough.”GOP House member: “Leadership backed into corner by lemmings with suicide vests”
With latest polls showing Congressional approval at 10 – 12% you would think someone would care. Polls at this point show over 80% disgusted with Congress on how they are handling this, and that means the Republicans, there ain’t none of that “both sides do it” sh*t this time. When you get a number like that, that leaves only the institutionalized, senile, and illiterates in the remaining approval category, just statistically speaking.
As John Stewart put it:
Mitch McConnell: “The President’s more than willing to negotiate with Iranians, I don’t know why he wouldn’t be willing to negotiate with us.”
Jon Stewart: “If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-lined, unreasonable totalitarian mullahs in the world, but not the Republicans, maybe he’s not the problem.”
I think the problem is the masters of the universe feel like they have jerry rigged and gerrymandered themselves into unassailable electoral positions, so they simply do not have to listen to constituents anymore.
I told Young’s staffer at one point I had to struggle not to call and just take the persona of sheer snark, and encourage and support them in this insane kabuki theater, since I honestly think the GOP is committing final political suicide at the moment, and have just become a bunch of lemmings wearing suicide vests. The following image has gone viral in the past 24 hours on the InnerTubes.
Well, the image is Meerkats, but as one commenter on one blog remarked, it is hard to find pics of lemmings to match to available images of suicide vests.
And keep in mind, the GOP is engaging in this kamikaze mission in order to save Americans from being able to buy health care insurance, in a program designed to keep that insurance in the private health insurance market. A plan originally conceived and advocated by the Heritage Foundation, one of the premier Right Wing conservative think tanks. The same program passed into law in Mass. when Romney was governor there.
They are waging a scorched earth war on government so that literally tens of millions of Americans will continue to be unable to have adequate insurance to help them have adequate access to health care.
This is what they want to repeal:
And those stats do not even touch the many millions of Americans who will now be able to buy affordable insurance through the exchanges being set up in states nationwide. Of course, those poor in the Republican controlled states, where their governors refused to implement the new Medicaid program for the indigent and truly poor will just have to suck dirt, be sick, and die. But then, the GOP do not care about them, anyway. After all, that is not their donor or electoral base.
But then, as so many members of the GOP have pointed out, they can just go to the Emergency Room. Which, of course, results in the American taxpayer and those who can afford insurance picking up the tab, because those costs are allocated into what we pay. They do not pay themselves.
There is no free lunch in the Emergency Room, contrary to apparent GOP belief.
I told Young’s staffer that as far as I was concerned, President Obama should just issue an executive order declaring the debt limit raised.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
The debt-ceiling crisis in 2011 raised the question of what powers Section 4 gives to the President, an issue that remains unsettled.[154] Some, such as legal scholar Garrett Epps, fiscal expert Bruce Bartlett and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have argued that a debt ceiling may be unconstitutional and therefore void as long as it interferes with the duty of the government to pay interest on outstanding bonds and to make payments owed to pensioners (that is, Social Security recipients).[155][156] Legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen has argued that Section 4 gives the President unilateral authority to raise or ignore the national debt ceiling, and that if challenged the Supreme Court would likely rule in favor of expanded executive power or dismiss the case altogether for lack of standing.[157] Erwin Chemerinsky, professor and dean at University of California, Irvine School of Law, has argued that not even in a “dire financial emergency” could the President raise the debt ceiling as “there is no reasonable way to interpret the Constitution that [allows him to do so]”.[158]
Section 5, by the way, does NOT give Congress the permission to NULLIFY, which is what the GOP is trying to do at the moment, return to the heady days of nullification that characterized the states in the run up to the Civil War. The whole point of the 14th amendment was to a great extent to point out that nullification thing was done and over with.
Interesting that the party who were waving their copies of the Constitution while standing on the floor of the House at the beginning of the last couple of terms seem never to have read or understand the document in the slightest.
The Constitution is crystal clear on this issue, it states in black and white that all debts of the United States shall be made good. There is no language in the Constitution allowing any waffling, or exceptions for Obamacare, birth control exceptions in insurance, or vaginal ultrasound probes, which is pretty much what the the poison pills the GOP kept stuffing into the bills sent to the Senate either were, or might as well have been, even up to a few minutes before midnight last night.
I am reminded of these great quotes from American political history, all spoken by members of the GOP from as late as the 1980’s to date.
“I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare — one of twelve, because we knew it wouldn’t work in 1965.” Bob Dole
“America’s seniors have also known where Republicans stand — for 40 years, they have waged war on Medicare. When Congress passed Medicare in 1965, only 13 Republicans in Congress supported it. When Newt Gingrich and Republicans tried to gut Medicare in 1995, President Clinton stopped them. That same year, Newt Gingrich made his intentions about Medicare clear. He said, ‘Now we didn’t get rid of it in round one because we don’t think that’s politically smart . . . But we believe it’s going to wither on the vine.’
Dick Armey, a Congressman from Texas, who is second in command in the House of Representatives. He said, `Medicare has no place in the free world. Social Security is a rotten trick. I think we are going to have to bite the bullet on Social Security and phase it out over time.’
