"My name is Legion
for we are many."
Posted on 01/29/2014 11:21:33 PM PST by Republican Wildcat
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address once again highlighted to the nation the political dichotomy that the Affordable Care Act has created in Kentucky.
One minute Obama was giving a mid-address shout-out to Gov. Steve Beshear over his implementation of the health care law. And the next minute, Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell was issuing a critical three-paragraph response to Obama’s speech focusing on the Obamacare section particularly.
“Obamacare is wreaking havoc with Kentucky’s economy and for the nation’s economy and unfortunately the president’s doubled down on that,” McConnell said in his statement. “So, it’s discouraging to see that after six years of trying to do this his way, he seems to be unwilling to move to the political center, work with us and do things through the private sector that we know will create jobs and opportunity for our people.”
But undaunted, Obama chided Republicans in Congress telling them that that if they have “specific plans to cut costs, cover more people, increase choice — tell America what you would do differently.”
He then pivoted to praise Beshear and Kentucky’s implementation where more people (183,000 as of Monday) have signed up for health coverage than in many states.
“He’s like a man possessed when it comes to covering his commonwealth’s families,” Obama said.
(Excerpt) Read more at mycn2.com ...
Obama knows a lot about possessing men.
Bitch must be up for reelection this year, he seems to have turned the Surrender Monkey knob down from 11 to a feisty 8. Oh wait, he is! Shocking!
everytime mitch opens his hypocritical mouth, i get an uncontrollable urge to give more money to bevin.
"My name is Legion
for we are many."
All that McConnell needed to do to shut down Obamacare was to muster the republican votes to vote against cloture of the defunding. Senator Cruz urged that this be done but McConnell stabbed him in the back by leading the republicans to vote for cloture.
McConnell had it in his hand to kill Obamacare and he let it live.
Did OBama happen to mention the Beshear set up the health exchange without legislative approval, or that he violated the Kentucky constitution while doing it?
Olympia Snowe (republican-rino from Maine) is the true Mother of Obamacare....it was her ONE VOTE that allowed it out of committee....Without that ONE VOTE....there would be no Obamacare!!!...NONE...NADA!..
(and then of course she voted against it on the floor in true RINO form knowing full well it was going to pass)
John Cornball does things like that too, but TX people can’t understand.
Regardless of McConnell, I don’t see how that would have worked - blocking a vote on a bill to defund it doesn’t defund it, either.
That’s not correct, either. Her vote to move the bill out of committee was not necessary - the Democrats held the majority - it would have passed out of there regardless of whether she voted for it or not (that doesn’t make her vote excusable, but to say she was the decider on that is simply not true). And in the end, that was not the bill that was voted on, and she also voted against the bill presented to the floor, but it was a 60-40 party line vote.
When contentious issues are brought up in Congress, Americans want to see how their views are reflected in their elected leaders. Americans are eager to see the debate. When there is no debate they feel robbed. It’s like a referee who calls a fight before the bell even rings because he feels it won’t change the outcome that he ‘knows’ will happen.
Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to Obamacare. Yet Congress does not reflect this opposition.
An effort to derail cloture would have disallowed Senate democrats a chance to defeat it by a simple majority. It would have extended debate and forced the liberal media to examine the defund terms which were simply to fund everything but Obamacare.
So the answer to your remark is you are missing the bigger picture.
McConnell knew when he mustered republic moderates to vote for cloture that the defund bill would fail. In leading the vote for cloture, he led the effort to defeat the defund bill in quick manner. He thought Americans were too stupid to notice what he was doing because he could later claim he voted to defund. He was wrong.
The best thing McConnell accomplished with his leading the vote for cloture was to expose republicans who are bought off, who have sold out, who are two-faced.
Ann Coulter had an excellent column following the vote for cloture and the vote led by Boehner to cave on the debt ceiling showdown. In it she exposed how DC really works. If you need funds to run for reelection, you must kowtow to party bosses. McConnell and Boehner control members by controlling how much of the graft and bribery pie they receive. They are sellouts. They think they can fool their constituents by talking conservative but their actions or lack of action allow the federal government to grow ever larger.
McConnell and Boehner want big government because that is a reflection of who they are or who they think they are.
Stopping cloture would have shined the spotlight on the ruling class. Carried to its ultimate extreme, Obama and Reid after a period of hissing and cussing would have entered negotiations for compromise by offering to delay Obamacare and avoid defunding it. This is what started to happen.
Stopping cloture long enough for the debt ceiling battle to come to the fore would have solidly associated in the public mind the cost of Obamacare with the never ending increases in the out of control national debt. If republicans had stuck to their guns as they had in the sequester battle of January of the same year, they would have had Obama-Reid on the ropes and their biased NY media along with them. But McConnell as a referee decided to hold republicans back because he thought it was a waste of time. HE THOUGHT THIS regardless of Americans melting the Capitol Hill switchboards.
McConnell is a big government guy. His life is centered inside the Beltway. He will never understand anything outside of it. It is his fortress. He will choose to defend big government before his constituents. He will play games in an attempt to fool his constituents. But his results are always always in favor of growing government.
The vote for cloture was a vote to shutdown debate about defunding Obamacare thereby allowing the press to fix blame on ‘extreme’ republican tea party conservatives for shutting down government (a lie).
IMPORTANT: It is a fact that before McConnell and Boehner abandoned conservatives and pulled the plug on their efforts, the overseas press including the liberal BBC were reporting the republicans were winning. After the plug was pulled, the reports were that republicans had lost. This was all the doing of McConnell and Boehner who are without a doubt in it for themselves and their special interests.
Had McConnell not led the vote for cloture on defunding, the burden would have shifted to the democrats as the exposure would have been prolonged allowing more Americans to absorb what was truly at stake. The period before the cloture vote was effectively a filibuster period. Anytime there is a filibuster, the liberal press eventually runs out of smears and disinformation tools. The longer the passion is kept in view, the more the public reconsiders the real reasons for the conflict. This was evident in those foreign reports of republicans winning the debate, mostly led by debate champion Ted Cruz. In effect, the extension of debate by avoiding a cloture vote would have swayed enough lawmakers in the Senate to pass the continuing resolution of the House which funded everything except Obamacare. Then the burden would be shifted to Obama who would have been held responsible for not taking funds to keep government operating because of his fixation on a program that Americans overwhelmingly did not want.
The battle raised awareness in flyover country. The coming primaries point to a 2010 like tsunami of republicans and independents ousting republican establishment types. McConnell, Graham, Cochran and so many others have bullseyes on their backs and they are down in the polls. Everything points to another Tea Party rout.
But now the battle has shifted to immigration which is an Obama agenda item that almost all Americans do not want. Millions upon millions of persons who came and stayed illegally will be granted amnesty and they will register to vote this year illegally because the law means nothing to them and voter registration forms do not require proof of citizenship. And they vote 88% for democrats.
Immigration will preserve the McConnell-Boehner status quo. Hence, Boehner is preparing this minute to unleash it even as he says in piecemeal manner. But any piece of immigration legislation from the House will be gutted in the Senate and replaced with their full blown amnesty version. Boehner will allow a full vote on the floor once the amnesty version comes back from conference. Thus, all the dems and 17 ‘squish’ republicans will pass it and amnesty election fraud will ensue. Holder will not provide a list of those granted amnesty so that election workers can scrub them from the voter rolls and there is no chance to reverse election results after the millions of amnestied persons vote illegally.
The takeaway from this is that it is not simply a ‘vote’, it is a process and it is a show. And McConnell performed horribly as an uber bureaucrat who imposed his personal ‘judgement’ to stop the process rather than act as an impassioned representative of the voters of his state.
The fact is you will never know if the defund battle would have worked because McConnell foreclosed on your chance to see the outcome. And you have formed the conclusion it wouldn’t work which shows you follow the McConnell view.
We’ll see if Bevin ousts McConnell. The polls show McConnell in lots of trouble and earlier straw votes in important Kentucky counties that McConnell needs have turned out overwhelmingly for Bevin.
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