Senator McConnell,
It has been quite dismaying to hear you talk of negotiation and compromise. You apparently don’t understand what happened on Tuesday. It was not a call for you to start trying to get some stuff done in allowing the Obama agenda to proceed, just at a moderated pace. Tuesday was millions of shouts from the hills and dales of America to stop it and to turn it back.
Obama loved to joke that on the car gear shift, D was for Democrat and R was for Republican. But it’s no joke. In Obama’s car, sitting in his back seat, that’s exactly what we want you to do. Put it in Republican and reverse the vast damage done in just 21 short months. Save this country from going over the cliff. Don’t move forward one more perilous inch.
Here’s what we don’t want you to do: Please, please, please do not try to “fix” ObamaCare. Don’t try to make it less painful, or less egregious. That’s exactly what the opposition wants you to do. (Listen, you can hear them chuckling in the next room as they listen to your pronouncements of reasonableness.) You are falling into their trap.
Tell them it’s all or nothing. Repeal or be proud of what they have done to us. They forced that huge pile of stinking, rotting refuse on us. Let them live with the results—the painful, oppressive, outrageous results that haven’t even started to kick in yet.
See, if you don’t do anything to fix it, if you leave it huge and hulking and crushing, just think of the outcry that will rise up around the land when it’s time to file our 1099 forms. Democrats will hear from their constituents, “How could you?” When more companies start removing health insurance from their benefit plans, the calls will flood the Democrats again. Squeak, squeak, squeak will turn into raging roars to get rid of the bill.
But if you agree to fiddle with the bill, fix 10 or 15 of the 2,300 pages in the bill, you lose all the squeaky wheels clamoring for repeal. The drive loses its force, becomes less urgent, less dire. Other things will become more important. And that’s just what the Democrats are hoping for.
If you agree to “dismantle” it piecemeal, the takeover will be secured; they’ll continue to have scores of new boards and regulating agencies with thousands of unelected bureaucrats making up new rules as they go along, kowtowing to the administration’s whims and grudges and extortions. We’ll have a national database of all of our medical records with no right to privacy. (The day Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama permit every tiny bit of their intimate medical data to be in the database with everyone else’s with no added security on it to protect it from prying eyes, is the day I’ll consider putting mine in.) We’ll have IRS agents not only inspecting all aspects of our financial condition but they’ll be worrying about our medical choices as well.
Plus, by the time the GOP has the presidency again, you’ll not only have to repeal the original bill, but you’ll have to repeal all your little fixes and then replace those fixes with new bills while trying to craft a new original bill that merely provides for free market solutions. It’ll never get done. It will be too much. Someone will want a little something different here for a vote there. Just stop it before you even have to start playing that game.
So I beg you: Don’t, please don’t, try to fix it. It is unfixable, period. Fixing the “most egregious provisions” will murder us by killing the best medical system in the world.
In fact, please drop the phrase “most egregious” from your talking points. It’s all egregious.
Please stand firm in your call for repeal. Have vote after vote for repeal, straight-up repeal. The country is behind you on that, and continued effort at full repeal will protect you from the continued fury with which the Democrats will have to deal.
It will not be easy. You will have to keep your spine braced for two long years, because the “egregious” parts will be slowly dripping out on the nation like water torture.
Can you withstand the pressure, Mr. Leader? If you can’t, we need to have someone else in your position who can. You’re up for reelection when?
[crossposted at Red State]
