Conservative Principles Now

On March 5th of last year, firefighter Travis Ulerick, of Dublin, Indiana, introduced President Barack Obama at a White House summit on health care. Upon hearing the first rumblings of dissent about the President’s plan, Ulerick tells USA Today he thought at the time: “I definitely think it’s going to have to be a huge consensus.” It’s now 12 months later, and the only consensus that exists among the American people is strong opposition to the President’s health care plan.The White House, however, is now completely uninterested in establishing a consensus for their health care plan before they jam it through Congress. Today, in a speech from the White House, President Barack Obama will urge Congress to move swiftly to pass his health care plan by implementing a legislative tactic that can be used to pass legislation that has failed to gain broad support among the American people. It’s known as reconciliation.

Reconciliation has been used in the past, but only for procedural reasons, not because the underlying policy change was unable to muster 60-vote support. So, for example, the 1996 welfare reform law signed by President Bill Clinton was passed through reconciliation, but it also ended up getting 78 votes in the Senate (28 of them from Democrats). President Ronald Reagan also passed seven bills through reconciliation, but every single one of those bills passed through a Democratically-controlled House and won Senate votes from both parties. Never has reconciliation been used to pass any bill on purely partisan lines.

In an attempt to provide some political cover for his nakedly-partisan health care push, President Obama released a letter yesterday identifying “four policy priorities” that “I am exploring.” Specifically he is “open” to: 1) random undercover investigations of health care providers that receive reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid; 2) $50 million in cash for states that reform medical malpractice laws in ways the White House approves of; 3) increased spending on Medicaid; and 4) language that clearly allows Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to qualify as health insurance.

The White House has not yet released any legislative language for any of these “policy priorities.” In fact, his letter does not even promise that whatever legislation the White House does eventually offer will contain language on each of these issues. He only says he is “exploring” the issues. This is beyond a sham of bipartisanship. Details matter. The American people must be allowed to see real legislative language and they must be allowed the time to read and comment on it before any votes are taken.

Most importantly, simply adding so-called conservative ideas to the bill does not change the fundamental direction of the proposal. The bills before Congress, including the President’s new additions, would still result in a massive shift of power over health care financing and delivery of care to Washington politicians and bureaucrats. The public has spoken, and it does not want a federal take over of health care.

Julia Denton of Yorktown, Virginia, another of the Obama administration’s hand-picked March 5 health summit attendees, tells USA Today: “The legislation as proposed is so long and tough to read that people are afraid of it. Health care is such a highly personal issue. I cannot see how anyone will win if unpopular reforms are forced through over vigorous opposition.” Denton is 100% correct. The American people should not have unpopular health care reform forced down their throats in the face of strong bipartisan opposition. At a bare minimum they should have the opportunity to see actual legislation from the White House and be allowed to speak to their members about it while they are home in their districts over Easter break.

Conservatives should continue to press the Administration and leaders in Congress for bipartisan solutions that are based on elements of common ground, including letting states take the lead on health reform, tackling the tax treatment of health insurance, sensible insurance market reforms, and an honest commitment to fixing existing health care programs that the government already controls.

For real bipartisanship to work, the President must set aside the current proposals that are based on consolidating power over health care in Washington and instead embrace solutions that would give individuals and families more control over health care dollars and decisions. Simply adjusting the magnitude of the existing proposals or adding so-called conservative provisions does not change this fundamental direction.

Quick Hits:

• Twice as many Texans voted in the Republican Gubernatorial primary election than in the Democratic primary. The reverse was true in the 2008 Presidential primary.
• Ethically-challenged Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) is still chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, but he will be taking a “leave of absence” until the investigation is over.
• Oral arguments at yesterday’s Supreme Court hearing on a gun control case suggest the majority seems willing to extend the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms to the states.
• After a slew of scandals and polls showing the number of Americans who believe that climate change is a scientific conspiracy has more than doubled since 2008, scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence.
• Privately-owned Ford Motor Co. surpassed Obama administration-owned General Motors Co. in sales last month for the first time in at least 50 years

In today’s Wall Street Journal, former President Bill Clinton’s pollster Doug Schoen writes: “Sen. Evan Bayh’s stunning decision to retire should serve as more than a wake-up call to Democrats. It should spur a fundamental re-examination and reorientation of the party’s policies, practices and approaches leading into the fall election. Let’s be clear. The Democratic brand is in trouble — big trouble. … The Democrats need to do a number of things. First and foremost, they need to recognize there is only one fundamental issue in America: jobs.”

Unfortunately, the White House is not getting the message. Where Schoen urges President Barack Obama to “go back to square one” on health care, The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration is doing the exact opposite: they are set to introduce their own health care bill on Monday that is specifically designed to pass the Senate through reconciliation on a strictly partisan vote. And when the left is not continuing to shove a government takeover of health care down the throats of the American people, they are working on a second stimulus plan that repeats all of the same big government borrow-and-spend mistakes of the first.

And there is no debate: by any objective measure, President Obama’s first stimulus was a complete failure. When President Obama signed the $862 billion first stimulus, the unemployment rate stood at 7.6% and the U.S. economy employed 133.5 million people. The President promised that, thanks to his stimulus, unemployment would never go higher than 8.2% and the U.S. economy would support 138.6 million jobs by December 2010. Today, unemployment is 9.7%, after rising above 10%, and the U.S. economy has lost almost 6 million jobs, leaving the White House 9 million jobs short of the 138.6 million they promised to deliver. The White House may claim their stimulus “saved” 2 million jobs, but they have zero real world evidence of this. As Heritage fellow Brian Riedl explains:

Specifically, the White House’s “proof” that the stimulus created jobs is an economic model that they programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs. How’s that for circular logic?

The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.

If deficit spending were the path to real-world economic growth, then the Greek economy would be booming. It’s not. There is an alternative. There are some no-cost measures our federal government could take that could create the space for American entrepreneurship and private investment, resulting in real long-term job growth. Heritage fellow James Sherk identifies eight such measures, including:

• Freezing all proposed tax hikes and costly regulations at least until unemployment falls below 7 percent;
• Freezing spending and rescinding unspent stimulus funds;
• Reforming regulations to reduce unnecessary business costs, such as repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act;
• Reforming the tort system to lower costs and uncertainty facing businesses;
• Removing barriers to domestic energy production;
• Suspending the job-killing Davis-Bacon Act (DBA);
• Passing pending free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama; and
• Reducing taxes on companies’ foreign earnings if they bring those earnings home.

Those wishing to score cheap political points against the conservative movement often falsely claim that conservatives hate the federal government. Nothing could be further from the truth. As The Mt. Vernon Statement, signed Tuesday by a broad coalition of conservative leaders, attests, our nation’s Founding Fathers ratified a U.S. Constitution that “created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law.” But while government is necessary to establish the rule of law required for any free market to function, that government must also be limited so that it does not create the uncertainties in the marketplace that undermine economic growth. The specific measures outlined above are consistent with these principles. And Doug Schoen is right - the Obama administration “needs to understand that the American people, particularly those who support the tea party movement, will only come back to Democrats if it demonstrates that it understands voters’ desire to return to the kind of limited government the movement endorses.”

Quick Hits:

Townhall will continue to live-stream all Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) events in the Marriott Ballroom today and throughout the conference.

In light of the failed United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen last December, U.N. Climate Chief Yvo de Boer announced his resignation yesterday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency declared for the first time yesterday that they had extensive evidence of “past or current undisclosed activities” by Iran’s military to develop a nuclear warhead.

A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) personally attacked Reps. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Scott Garrett (R-NJ) and Tom Rooney (R-FL) for their participation in a video web chat about Obama’s Failed Stimulus hosted by Heritage yesterday.