On the heels of Republicans trying to repeal ObamaCare for the 39th time, we find out that their actions are contrary to most Americans wishes, even though Speaker Boehner keeps telling the media he’s doing the will of the people. Repealing ObamaCare is what your House of tea-cowed “Representatives” spends 15% of its time doing.
According to a United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll released Monday evening, most Americans don’t want Republicans to repeal ObamaCare. Only 36% want it repealed, probably the very same 36% who still think Bush was a great president, believe that Obama is responsible for the bank bailouts of 2008, still think Iraq was connected to 9/11 and believe in WMD. In other words, your basic Fox victim.
Given the choice to either repeal the law, wait and see how it takes effect, or add money to aid its implementation, only 36 percent of adults picked outright repeal. More than half chose to either wait and see (30 percent) or provide more money (27 percent).
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The National Journal poll informed respondents that the nonpartisan CBO has determined that the Republican (they left that identifier out) plan to repeal ObamaCare would actually INCREASE the deficit (when doesn’t a Republican idea increase the deficit?), and thus a “narrow plurality” preferred to keep the law.
On the question, 48 percent said “Congress should keep the program to expand coverage because it’s important to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance,” while 42 percent said “Congress should repeal the program to expand coverage because the government can’t afford it at a time of large budget deficits.”
Republicans have never once offered an actual alternative to ObamaCare, and “repeal and replace” morphed into just the lonely old “repeal” after the election.
Someone should have told these respondents that under Obama our government spending has grown at a slower rate than it did under any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and in June we had a huge budget SURPLUS. Yes, that’s right. I know you hear nothing about a surplus, but the media has to run narratives past the RNC for satisfactory terror alert levels.
Yes, we had a huge budget surplus in June, mostly due to this magical thing we call revenue, or “taxes”, that puts more in the plus column in order to pay for the minus column. It’s sort of like trying to pay your bills while having a job versus not having a job (less taxes, no taxes).
Also, the meme that Obama drove up the deficits with liberal spending is not exactly accurate either. We got to these deficits with Republicans in charge, a war left off of the budget all together, an unpaid for Medicare Part D program, a refusal to collect revenue from the wealthy, a financial shell game based on “credit” and too-big-to-fail, and a lot of deregulation leading to wild spending and even wilder free-falls that we then had to bail out with taxpayer money (aka, the deficit) because they had been so deregulated that their failure ostensibly threatened our economy.
In fact, ‘the President’s policies are contributing to the most rapid deficit reduction since World War II.’
Lastly, another shocker for Republicans – guess what? Minority voters actually care about issues:
Among nonwhites, 60 percent said lawmakers should keep the law intact with only 32 percent backing the repeal option, highlighting how the GOP’s problems with minority voters extend into economic issues.
Over and over again, we try to explain to Republicans that they can’t get a big tent by painting blackface on white, patriarchal policies, or get the female vote by dressing up the mom they want to have sex with in tight skirts and CFM heels and telling women she represents feminism, or get the Hispanic vote by having Mitt Romney wear a very dark tan to the Spanish language TV interview while he orders the “staff” around and refuses to go on unless he’s reintroduced as he demands.
Perhaps Republicans can’t grasp the lack of superficiality in others because they can only see what they are, but even during the election, Hispanics tried to tell them that they cared about more than just immigration. It’s almost as if — GASP! — Hispanics, women, and African Americans are people.
With. people. concerns. Something to ponder.
On Sunday, Speaker John Boehner told us he was doing the people’s work by repealing laws instead of passing laws. This poll is proof that he is wrong, once again, and on the very thing he has now tried to repeal 39 times. Boehner is not doing the will of the majority; he is doing the bidding of the majority party in the House. There is a big difference, especially because that party is out of step on a national level.
Even gerrymandering can have its downsides.
The only plus here for Republicans is that Americans don’t think the implementation of ObamaCare is going well. Certainly Republicans have done all that they can to foster that narrative, if not develop it. Yes, it’s a huge change and the implementation will be at times confusing and things will need to be tweaked, but adjusting to changing conditions is not a sign of weakness. Only a Republican would think it was.
The White House is shifting to accommodate changing conditions, instead of trolling from an armchair on the sidelines, predicting doom no matter what the conditions are.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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