Free Republic

Today's health care summit is nothing more than political theater. Like an infomercial, it will pretend to be authentic, but it's actually contrived. Its purpose is to give President Obama a setting in which he can appear to rise above politics and partisanship to get things done for the American people. In fact, it is a device he is using to resurrect unnecessary, harmful legislation that the American people oppose and ram it through Congress.... The White House is using the summit to try to corner Republicans by making them either buy into his plan or boycott the process and...

...Republicans should send in Sen. Jon Kyl, Rep. Ron Paul (a doctor) and Steve King... No other Republicans should be allowed talk...

The Senate's top Republican promised Sunday morning that he and his members will attend President Obama's health care summit on Thursday "ready to participate" but said the Democrats are being "arrogant" by refusing to scrap their legislation and start over. "You know, they are saying, "Ignore the wishes of the American people. We know more about this than you do. And we're going to jam it down your throats no matter what," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Fox News Sunday.

So, President Obama is finally getting around to listening to Republican ideas on health care reform. That's a good thing. But in preparing for Mr. Obama's health care summit, Republicans should keep in mind that this isn't an "It's Academic" session in which the smartest one with all the facts and figures wins. Rather, the politician who simultaneously appeals to Americans' wants and needs in the emotionally charged arenas of health care and fiscal reform wins. Mr. Obama has only the health care wants and needs part right - he doesn't know how to deliver without breaking the bank. That's...

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, issued a statement late Saturday in response to President Obama's Friday invite to a bipartisan Health Care Summit at the White House. Boehner and other Republican leaders are complaining that the event is simply political gamesmanship and that Obama is planning to have a health care deal finalized before anyone even sits down at the meeting, which is scheduled to take place on Feb. 25. Here's Boehner's statement: A productive bipartisan discussion should begin with a clean sheet of paper. We now know that instead of starting the 'bipartisan' health care 'summit' on Feb....

Krauthammer: "Here's what you do: you show up and you designate one guy who knows a lot about all this health care stuff as your only spokesman. You don't have people raising their hands and shouting questions. You pick Paul Ryan who knows this stuff up and down."

A summit primer: But the Democratic leadership nonetheless presses forward. The latest tactic is to convince people that health care in America is so broken that the Congress has a duty to pass the Senate bill "to get something done" -- even if it means using a process that would throw any pretense of bipartisanship out the window. Speaker Pelosi has outlined yet another tortured parliamentary scenario to get the measure passed before Easter, using the 51-vote reconciliation process in the Senate. That would be an admission that they don't even have enough Democratic Senate votes to get a bill...

Politics: The GOP has been invited by the administration to a health care summit. Will it be an effort to pass real reform, or an attempt to lure Republicans into a bipartisan disaster?...

Politics: The GOP has been invited by the administration to a health care summit. Will it be an effort to pass real reform, or an attempt to lure Republicans into a bipartisan disaster? When Democrats thought their absolute majorities in the House and Senate guaranteed the passage of government-run health care, they had no use for either GOP input or transparency. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were quite content to fundamentally transform one-sixth of the American economy behind the closed doors of a Senate room. They dismissed the rising anger of the...

A couple of Washington's most familiar con jobs are now front and center of our national leaders' approaches to two of the most critical issues facing the nation. Frequently when the White House and Congress want to look like they are doing something concrete, when in fact they want to keep doing what they've been doing, they form a "bipartisan commission" or "task force" to study a problem and then recommend courses of action. Thus, President Obama and the Democratic leadership of Congress are pushing for the creation of a bipartisan commission to study the federal government's exploding deficits and...