Go here.
Enter your zipcode.
Your Congressman’s name and phone number will appear.
Call him and tell him to vote against the Senate’s health care plan.
How hard can that be?
Enter your zipcode.
Your Congressman’s name and phone number will appear.
Call him and tell him to vote against the Senate’s health care plan.
How hard can that be?
Posted by Brian Darling
ReplyDeleteCongressman Eric Massa (D-NY) gave us a glimpse into the inner workings of the House Democrat Caucus. Massa voted against ObamaCare when it came up in the House last year. He alleged on a New York radio station that he is being forced out of Congress because of his stance on ObamaCare. Aside from the validity of the allegations against him, Massa gives us a glimpse into a fight within the Democrat Caucus on the political viability of the President’s health care reform proposal. Massa shows us that there are some Democrats pleading with Speaker Pelosi (D-Ca) to back away from ObamaCare.
According to Politico:
Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) says the House ethics committee is investigating him for inappropriate comments he made to a male staffer on New Year’s Eve — and that he’s the victim of a power play by Democratic leaders who want him out of Congress because he’s a “no” vote on health care reform.
If this is true and Democrat Leaders are forcing Massa out of Congress to help pass ObamaCare, this something that should be investigated by the House Ethics Committee. When did Democrat Leadership know about the allegations against Massa? Was the timing of the disclosure of the allegations part of a plan to help pass ObamaCare? Massa claims that the Democrat Leadership will “stop at nothing” to get what they want. More Politico:
And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill.
Were they willing to force a member out of Congress to pass ObamaCare? Much of this story came from a radio broadcast of Massa on WKPQ (TH to Brietbart.tv). Massa claims that one pressure point that Dems used was to have union leaders threaten him to vote for ObamaCare or get no union money.
I have had union leaders tell me point blank we are not going to contribute to your campaign unless you vote for this health care bill. Is that or is that not a bribe?
I don’t know. It seems unethical. The promise of campaign contributions for a vote for health care may be considered a quid pro quo bribe under current law. A bigger question is whether this threat was made at the behest of Members of Congress or Obama Administration officials. Massa alleges that Democrats have lost their way. They railed against Republicans for using strong arm tactics to pass bills, like the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, yet now they are engaging in unethical behavior to pass health care reform.
The leadership of the Democratic party have become exactly what they said they were running against they have become exactly what we all ran against.
This anger and rage is coming from an elected member of the Democrat party. This is a member that attended closed door meetings with leaders. One of the points Massa made is that Democrats are ignoring Republican claims that the American people do not like ObamaCare and have repeatedly rejected it.
You can not effectively govern this country without the consent of governed. The entire nation has said let’s rewrite the health care bill. Let’s find what we can agree upon. No. No. No. We are going to ram this down the throats of the American people.
Consent of the governed is an important concept and the Democrats have ignored the polls calling for Congress to start over and people of Massachusetts who sent Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) to the Capitol to kill ObamaCare. Massa, a Democrat, was a voice in the caucus saying to rewrite the bill and listen to the American people.
The American people have lost faith in this piece of legislation and if we pass this bill using reconciliation it will tear this country to pieces. It will rip this country asunder. And I have made this argument over and over and over and over again with House Leadership.
And the House leadership ignored him and others saying that reconciliation, the Health Care Nuclear Option, will destroy our nation politically. The people will be very angry and our populace will become more polarized.
I have said we are supposed to be as democrats the party of unity. We are supposed to be the party that builds consensus. We are supposed be the part that governs equally without malice towards anyone. We are supposed to be the ones that find the solutions.
ReplyDeleteThe promise — the covenant Democrat leadership had with the American people has been broken. They have not been the party of unity, nor the party of consensus, nor the party that governs without malice, nor the ones that find solutions. They have been the party of a faction that ignores broad based solutions in favor of using strong arm tactics to force through a left wing approach to health care reform.
But instead of actually trying finding the solutions and writing a piece of legislation that will get you a 90 percent solution with 70 percent agreement among the American people. They are going to ram this bill down the throats of this country and it is going to rip this nation to pieces politically and it will be a generation for this nation to recover.
These are strong words from Congressman Massa, but, his words give us some evidence that elements of the Democrat party are pleading for ObamaCare to be shelved. One may be skeptical of his claims of innocence, yet still give credence to his strong claims of unethical behavior on the part of Dem Leadership. ObamaCare is taking on some water and the bill may yet stink because of the dangerous tactics Dems have used to railroad the bill through Congress against the will of the American people.
Posted by Lori Ziganto
ReplyDelete“Government Health Care is not about health care; It’s about Government.” So reads the last line of Mark Steyn’s latest brilliant article, which I strongly suggest that everyone read. He’s right, of course, but I’d go even a step further. It’s not just about government, it’s about a mindset and a freedom-squashed way of life. Once the government becomes more than just a safety net, becomes instead a catch-all stifling protective bubble, it kills freedom and the individual. At it’s core, freedom is meant to be risky. It isn’t safe; it’s just free.
Health care control is how the left intends to achieve their ultimate goals. They looked to Britain, for example, and saw that government health care was the key to total control. Make everything “for the common good”. Protect people from everything, even from themselves and you make them so dependent upon you that they will bend to your every will and you can further your agenda with little resistance. This is difficult, if not impossible, to change once the mindset is ingrained. Elections alone won’t do it. Steyn points that out here:
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha’penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.
Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.
OK, then what? You’ll roll it back – like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel’n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter?
This is why Erick Erickson is correct when he calls Democrats, willing to throw themselves on the proverbial grenade by voting for the health care bill, “health care suicide bombers.” It’s accurate because, to them, it isn’t about health care itself; it’s about ideology and statist utopian dreams. Hopeandchange ™ sounded pretty and all, but it was really about fundamental change of our entire Country and the principles upon which it was founded. Once socialized medicine is in place, the fundamental change will occur and, as Steyn pointed out above, it will be next to impossible to roll-back. Remember, it took decades to merely reform welfare a tiny bit and even that didn’t really stick. The entitlement mentality was already starting to reign King. Add health care to that mix, and it becomes despotic.
Steyn explains that further here:
Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.
I’ve been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary “comprehensive” health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.
ReplyDeleteIt’s worth it to them. And we need only look to Britain to see the dire consequences if it occurs. It wasn’t even so much the Socialized medicine itself, but rather the way it insidiously set in place a total mindset. Health care was the cornerstone in changing an entire way of life; of making people completely and utterly dependent, even for their lives, upon Big Daddy Government. It is pervasive and takes over every aspect of life; a life that is no longer truly free. It’s that actual mindset that we *must* beat and socialized medicine is the way they are seeking to cement it. For them, in order to seal the statist deal, they need to squash the individual and control behavior. Health care is the means to that end; it’s for “the common good.”
While it’s hard to repeal or change laws, as we well know, it is near impossible to change such a pervasive mindset. This is made harder by the fact that the entitlement mentality mindset has been working it’s way into our culture for decades, aided by the Press and our education system. Right now, we are at the precipice, but have been maintaining our footing somewhat. But, socialized medicine, I fear, would push us off that edge. I’ve seen it first-hand, or, rather second-hand. My entire family on my Mom’s side lives in Scotland. They all now honestly believe that the government is meant to provide all and take care of everything. For the common good and all. Notice, it’s never for the individual’s good, but only for the “collective” good. An important distinction if there ever was one.
What has happened here in America is something that De Tocqueville foresaw when he said “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” You see, people have forgotten or they choose to forget, that equal opportunity does not magically guarantee effortless equal results. Nor is it meant to. Our republic was built as a testament to the human condition of free will. It allows for unlimited success and, with that, sometimes comes failure. That, taking risks, is the mother of invention and what has made us what we are today.
The modern day Progressive seeks to inhibit that. While they claim to be oh-so-tolerant and open-minded and while they profess the freedom of individuality mantra, they are actually the ones who seek to silence any thought and opinions that differ from their own tunnel-visioned view of the World. With all their talk of enlightenment and evolution, they are literally De-volving and are actually moving against basic, innate human nature and what used to be a penchant to strive for success. They symbolize the antithesis of that. In diametric opposition to natural instinct, they seek to turn individual success and enterprise into a punishment. Into a failure. They seek to turn the individual into a part of a mediocre pack. They hope to turn us into their Useful Idiots by seizing final control in a way that will not just be a slippery slope, but a patch of black ice leading to the curtailing of almost all of our individual liberties.
Right on Chris. Powerful words, and very true. Communists like Comrade Bruce and Comrade Peters should be vilified for the ideals they represent.
ReplyDelete