Archives for March 2015

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud the Supreme Court for refusing to hear an appeal of Wisconsin’s voter ID law, scoring a win for election integrity and handing another loss to opponents of Scott Walker.  They also groan as Israeli intelligence briefs Congress about the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks and the Obama administration is far more upset that Congress knows what’s going on than that Israel was spying on the meetings.  And they react to the police finishing a months-long investigation into the Rolling Stone rape allegation at the University of Virginia and concluding there is no evidence that it ever happened.

Five years after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, the White House claims the law is working even better than imagined but one of its leading critics says every major promise is now proven untrue and costs will keep going higher and higher unless we change course.

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, into law.  It happened after a fierce debate on the House floor just a few days earlier and a controversial move by Senate Democratic leaders to pass changes by a simple majority since they did not have the votes to do it through regular order.

The law took full effect in 2014, following a disastrous roll-out of the federal health care exchange website in October 2013.   But for those who warned against the law before it’s passage, the contents of the law are far more troubling than the major technical problems that bogged down the exchange.

“People have learned on a very personal level how they were lied to in the passage of this law.  They’ve lost their doctor.  They’ve lost their health plan.  Their costs are going up.  Many people have lost jobs and certainly hours as a result of it.  Small businesses have felt a huge impact.  It’s been a tremendous drain on the economy, and very few if any of those original promises were met,” said Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner.

Turner is a longtime veteran Washington health care policy debates.  She was at the forefront of the effort to stop the Clinton administration’s attempt to overhaul the health care system in 1993 and is still fighting to roll back Obamacare.

She was in the House chamber in March 2010 during the final, intense moments of the debate.

“The promises of utopia from Democrats was astonishing to me.  ‘Finally we’re going to get to universal coverage.  We’re going to provide coverage to everybody and we’re going to reduce the deficit.  Everybody’s going to save.  Families are going to save $2,500 on their health insurance costs.’ On and on and on it went,” said Turner.

Last week in Cleveland, President Obama referenced the five years since Obamacare was enacted and said the past half-decade proved the law’s critics very wrong.

“Every prediction they’ve made about it turned out to be wrong,” Obama said, accusing critics of employing an “evidence be damned” approach to evaluating the law.

“It’s working better than even I expected,” he said.

Turner says the facts tell a very different story.

“We are seeing an even greater shortage of physicians.  Many of them are selling their practices or even closing their practices because they can’t comply with this avalanche of rules and regulations,” said Turner.

“We’re seeing young people having an ever more difficult time getting that first job to get their foot on the ladder, because the employer mandate has had such a huge dampening effect on job creation in this country,” she said.

And then there are the costs.

“We’re seeing families paying ever higher pricesfor health insurance that has many more benefits than they want and often less access to physicians and hospitals that they want.  They have not saved $2,500 a year.  It has not met its target, even its reduced target, in access to health insurance,” said Turner.

“So I don’t know where he’s getting his numbers but it is not based upon the actual facts of what’s happening as a result of this law,” she said.

Contrary to promises that the law would lower health care premiums, Turner the average person enrolling on the federal exchange in 2013 witnessed a 40 percent spike in rates.  As a result, she says focus groups of Americans of all political stripes demonstrate great anger and frustration over the hit to their wallets.

“Half of them voted for President Obama, half of them voted for Romney in the last election to make sure we have a good mix of swing voters.  You can’t tell the difference between them when they start talking about this law and how they have been personally harmed by it.  The first thing you hear is how expensive their health care is now,” said Turner.

Turner says the financial toll will only get more burdensome if we continue on the present course.

“It’s a prescription for health care inflation.  You’ve not increased the supply of doctors and hospitals and in fact hospitals are merging and consolidating.  We’re learning today that many more rural hospitals are likely to close.  You’re pumping all this additional taxpayer money into the health sector, it’s an absolute prescription for inflation,” said Turner.

According to Turner, the Obama administration has already made 49 unilateral changes to the law to prevent it from imploding in its infancy.  She says a full repeal in Congress will not succeed as long as Obama is president.  She says the best near-term hope for major change lies in the Supreme Court’s consideration of King v. Burwell.

That’s the case contending the text of the Affordable Care Act provides for subsidies only through state exchanges and not the federal exchange.  Since three-quarters of the states refused to set up exchanges, Turner says a ruling to forbid subsidies through the federal exchange would have a major impact.

“Obamacare would basically be invalidated in 37 states if the plaintiffs win in this case.  That would provide an opportunity for the Congress to begin to reset the dial, to provide coverage for the people who would otherwise lose it,” said Turner.

She says the best approach in that scenario is to empower states to take the lead on health coverage.

“(People) would have options or health insurance that their states approve but doesn’t have to comply with all of the rules and mandates of Obamacare.  It gets away from the employer mandate, moves away from the individual mandate.  Millions of people would be protected from Obamacare’s onerous rules and requirements,” said Turner.

Turner says a win at the Supreme Court will provide a critical opportunity for congressional Republicans to chart a better course while showing concern for people in need of quality, affordable health care.

“Members of Congress on both sides, governors, attorneys general, all of them have stepped forward and said, ‘Yes, we want to take care of those five to six million people, but we want to do it in a way that gives people more freedom, more choice and really unleashes the opportunity for people to purchase the kind of coverage and insurance they want, without these extraordinarily expensive rules and mandates that Obamacare requires,'” said Turner.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty applaud Ted Cruz for dispensing with the usual song and dance and just announcing he is running for president.  They react to news that Hillary Clinton often communicated with top State Department officials through their private emails as well.  And we scratch our heads as President Obama accuses Benjamin Netanyahu of winning through divisive politics.

The Capitol Steps welcome Prince Charles and his wife Camilla by brushing off their slightly less than respectful parody from the time of their wedding.  Our guest is Steps star and co-founder Elaina Newport.

Months after the Veterans Administration scandal exploded in the headlines, top officials are still lying and hiding information from Congress and President Obama is actively trying to roll back the freedom of veterans to seek health care outside of the government system.

That’s the conclusion of Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kans., a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

Last May, the VA was rocked by reports that veterans were forced to wait months for routine medical appointments and that some officials were doctoring hospital and medical records to cover up the failure to provide care.  In response, Veterans Affairs Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki resigned and Congress approved legislation giving future secretaries more freedom to remove ineffective personnel.  Former Procter & Gamble Chairman Robert McDonald was eventually confirmed to succeed Shinseki and lead major reform efforts.

Are there signs of improvement?

On Monday evening, the House Veterans Affairs Committee grilled VA General Counsel Leigh Bradley over why more than 100 separate requests for information from the committee have gone unanswered for months and why the information that is given is often found to be false.

“The news only gets worse and worse,” said Huelskamp.

According to Associated Press reports on the hearing, committee chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., expressed deep frustration with the VA’s lack of cooperation on key facts, including wait times for veterans at the Phoenix hospital where the scandal began.

“Let there be no mistake or misunderstanding: When this committee requests documents, I expect production to be timely, complete and accurate,” said Miller.

Huelskamp is particularly incensed at the falsehoods coming out of the VA, including one stated by Secretary McDonald on NBC’s “Meet the Press”.

“They have falsified information and it is not just lying to members of Congress, it’s lying to the American people.  We even had the secretary about a month ago lie on national television and claim that he had fired sixty employees that made up, falsified, cooked the books on wait times for our vulnerable veterans,” said Huelskamp.

The real number was nowhere near that high.

“He only fired four.  There’s a big difference between four and sixty, so there’s a lack of trust there.  But this is, more importantly, a lack of trust between veterans who deserve their care and whether they’re getting in on time and whether they’re getting the proper care,” said Huelskamp.

And the congressman says the lies don’t stop there.

“The VA claimed that at the (Los Angeles) veterans facility, the wait was only four days.  We found out later, according to a CNN report, that it’s more than 30 days.  Who do you believe”  Who I believe is the veteran.  If the veteran says they’ve been waiting, that’s what happens,” said Huelskamp.

Huelskamp says when Congress tries to separate fact from fiction, the massive VA bureaucracy grinds investigations to a halt.

“We’ve had, I think, three secretaries of the VA in my four years here.  For secretary after secretary and undersecretary after undersecretary, I didn’t know that had that many undersecretaries.  They always send a new one over and the answer is always, ‘We’ll get back to you.  We’ll get that answer to you,'” said Huelskamp.

“We have documented where they have lied to the committee, where they have falsified information,” he said.

If anything good came out of the VA scandal, Huelskamp believes it is the provision within last year’s reform bill that allows veterans to access care outside of the government system in order to shorten how long they wait for care.  The congressman says expanded choice is working well for veterans and no longer forces many of them to travel hundreds of miles to approved doctors and facilities.  He says that change is further proof the less government is involved in our health care, the better that care will be.

“That’s the best government health care you can get, and what we saw in Phoenix and around the country is that it’s been an abysmal failure,” said Huelskamp.

While the expanded health care choices may be popular with veterans, Huelskamp says the Obama administration is actively trying to eliminate it.

“When the administration came in and asked to end the Veterans Choice Program, that sent shock waves through Congress because most Democrats and Republicans agree we need to improve the system and give veterans more choice in their health care,” said Huelskamp.

“There’s a pushback from the administration but the secretary has agreed, maybe not the president but the secretary has agreed veterans deserve to keep their choice,” he said.  “We’re trying to push the VA in a different direction than Obamacare is taking the rest of the healthcare system.  I think at the end of the day, the better model is putting Americans in charge of their health care, not Washington, D.C.”

When will Congress get time answers and the VA operate more efficiently?   Huelskamp says a big part of the problem is a massive government bureaucracy that takes a long time to straighten out

“There’s a culture of non-accountability, a culture of attacks on whistleblowers.  That’s been going on for decades.  It’s difficult to change that.  That takes years,” said Huelskamp, who estimates some 330,000 bureaucrats are involved in VA operations.

“I think many of them do a terrific job but it’s a system that’s set up based on the 1950s and 60s, not 2015.  So it is a cultural shift at the VA, but the president has to provide leadership.  I fear in the next two years, he will continue to drift away from any commitments to veterans in terms of reforming the system,” said Huelskamp.

What about Secretary McDonald?  Is he the right man to lead this change?

“We’ll see if the secretary can answer those questions we asked a couple of nights ago.  Some of these questions have been outstanding for months, which will give us insight (into) whether they’re really making the changes that were promised,” said Huelskamp.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer Kentucky Coach John Calipari for reminding his players that college basketball is not communism and they need to perform if they want to play.  They also cringe as President Obama touts mandatory voting.  And they shake their heads as Hillary Clinton calls for fun camps for adults.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., says Republican leaders are wasting historic majorities in Congress by surrendering on critical issues like immigration and driving deep wedges in the party by collaborating more with Democrats than conservatives on key votes.

“We are talking about historical vote margins in the House and Senate.  Republicans have done better than we have in probably 80-90 years.  We have immediately started squandering away that victory,” said Huelskamp.

Huelskamp says the biggest disappointments are in fully funding what he considers to be President Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty and in failing to stop Washington’s desire to tax more and spend more.  He says the problem started back in December with the “cromnibus” bill, even before the GOP gained control of the U.S. Senate.

“Both Speaker John Boehner and soon-to-be Leader Mitch McConnell backed away and seem more intent on working with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi than they are conservatives,” said Huelskamp.

Most frustrating to Huelskamp is the Republican surrender on blocking money for the president’s unilateral action to grant legal status to five million adults in the U.S. illegally.  The “cromnibus” bill funded the program through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for just two months, with the stated intention of killing the appropriation once the GOP controlled both the House and Senate.

In January, the House passed DHS funding without money for Obama’s legalization program.  Republicans tried to move that bill through the Senate but Democrats filibustered it.  McConnell then relented and allowed for full DHS funding in exchange for a separate vote to strip out the new immigration money.  The funding bill passed.  Efforts to defund the legalization program failed.  After an initial one-week extension for DHS appropriations, the House also fully funded Obama’s immigration actions.

Huelskamp is appalled.

“What we hear again and again is, ‘Boy, if we do well in the next election, we’ll really fight on some conservative principles.’  It’s always about the next election, the next battle.  What I hear from the American people, particularly conservatives across this country is, ‘Stand for something.’  Win or lose, they know the difference between trying and failing and not trying at all,” said Huelskamp.

“So far what I’ve seen this year is not trying at all,” he said.  “You have too many insiders, both in the Republican Party and the Democrat Party that are more interested in their future up here than what the American people want.”

While many Republicans say the fight to stop what most call an unconstitutional amnesty is far from over, Huelskamp says the GOP just rolled over on the best and possibly last chance to really stop the president.

“The leadership of the House and Senate Republicans have essentially folded their tents and given up on immigration.  There is no more battle.  It’s now left up to the courts,” said Huelskamp.

The congressman says depending on the courts just got harder now that the legislative branch gave a firm thumbs up to the immigration program by funding it for the rest of the fiscal year.

“We sent a very strong bad message to the courts when the leadership essentially agreed with the president’s position and funded it, hoping somehow against hope that the Supreme Court’s going to come in and save the day.  That didn’t work with Obamacare.  I hope it works with immigration, but there is no plan for the House or Senate Republicans to challenge this,” said Huelskamp, who says Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently told lawmakers not to rely on the courts to stop Obama.

“He advised the members, saying, ‘Do not expect the Supreme Court to do your constitutional duty.’  He said, ‘We can’t.  That’s up to you,'” said Huelskamp.

Beyond an unwillingness to fight fiercely against the Obama agenda, Huelskamp says when it comes to amnesty there a lot of Republicans who are far more accepting of the idea than they’re willing to state publicly.

“What I think is the reality is we have plenty of Republicans that said they were against the amnesty but silently hope it prevails and continues ahead.  They would much rather the issue go away than to stand on principle,” he said.

Huelskamp is no stranger to public disputes with Republican leaders in 2013, Boehner stripped Huelskamp and two other critical conservatives of plum committee assignments for not being loyal enough to leadership.

After Huelskamp and other conservatives refused to support a three-week or one-week extension of DHS funding as part of Boehner’s attempt to force a House-Senate conference on the DHS funding bill, the congressman found himself targeted in ads from a Super PAC affiliated with the House GOP leadership.  The ad accused Huelskamp of not being conservative and putting politics ahead of national security.

“For a sitting Speaker of the House to use and rely on outside groups to target and attack fellow Republicans is unprecedented.  I think that demonstrates the weakness of the speaker and his position,” said Huelskamp.

Huelskamp believes current leaders still have a 1990s mentality towards conducting business, but he says there are far too many crises brewing to shirk the need for strong leadership.

“It’s a different world.  We have $18 trillion of debt.  We have our foreign policy in shambles.  We have amnesty being forced upon us by the president.  We’ve got out of control executive agencies that are pushing the agenda of the left.  The idea that you can negotiate and compromise with this president, I don’t think our leadership gets that,” said Huelskamp.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are impressed by the number of Democrats who seem truly bothered by the Hillary Clinton email scandal.  They scold the Obama administration for its petulant reaction to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party winning Tuesday’s elections in Israel.  And they have fun with the odd reality that Dick Cheney did an interview for Playboy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party scored a surprisingly comfortable win in Tuesday’s parliamentary elections, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says the vote was a “stinging defeat” for President Obama that will make Iran far more nervous and probably lead to more appeasement from the U.S. in nuclear negotiations.

Most polls prior to Tuesday’s elections suggested momentum was moving away from Netanyahu and Likud.  When early reports suggested high turnout among Arab voters, the outlook seemed even more bleak for the prime minister.  However, it became clear fairly early in the vote counting that Likud would win.  The party scored 30 seats and is poised not only to form a coalition government without much trouble but it will likely be even more conservative than the current government.

The results also follow Obama political operative Jeremy Bird and his team working to defeat Netanyahu.  Members of Congress are investigating whether taxpayer funds were used in the efforts.  Either way, Bolton says there is no way to spin the elections as anything other than a crushing defeat for the Obama administration.

“It’s a stinging political defeat for the president and those who wanted to get rid of Netanyahu.  They were making the mistake of counting their chickens before they hatched in the run-up to the election and now all of that’s changed,” said Bolton.

Obama also stands out Wednesday as one of few western leaders to not congratulate Netanyahu on Likud’s victory.  Secretary of State John Kerry conveyed his congratulations instead.  Is Obama’s personal silence significant?

“Yes, I think the president can’t stand Bibi Netanyahu .  I personally don’t think he can stand Israel while we’re on the subject.  Not congratulating a democratically-elected leader in a close ally of the United States, I just think is amateurish..  It’s not professional.  It’s not presidential.  It’s just petty,” said Bolton.

“I think the president ought to get over it and at least send out a tweet,” he added.

Obama routinely congratulates winners in less friendly nations, including current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani after his victory in 2013.

How did Netanyahu and Likud win when all polls at the end predicted the party would come up short?  Bolton says one issue dwarfs all others in Israel.

“The Israeli people still fundamentally see security issues as the most important that they face as a country and a people,” said Bolton.

Netanyahu’s problem for much of the campaign was that the narrative constantly drifted back to domestic issues, in which his record is far more controversial.

“The campaign has been dominated by domestic economic issues and there was a lot of criticism of Netanyahu that he had not carried through on market-oriented reforms that he said in his last campaign would be a priority,” said Bolton, who says in the end Israeli voters cared more about the survival of the nation than Netanyahu’s broken domestic promises.

“When people really thought of the consequences of replacing him, they realized that there just isn’t anybody in the Israeli political scene who can do the job that Netanyahu can on these vital security issues,” said Bolton.

Bolton admits all political parties are adamantly opposed to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, but he says the difference between how Netanyahu and Labor candidate Isaac Herzog would approach the issue is immense.

“There’d be a much greater willingness (by Labor) to follow Barack Obama’s lead, much closer views on creating a Palestinian State.  Therefore, the ability of Barack Obama to pressure a Herzog or (Tzipi) Livni government not to act militarily against Iran would have been overwhelming.  Whereas now, I think he has essentially zero influence on Bibi Netanyahu,” said Bolton.

The threat of military action is the major chip Israel has while Iran and the U.S. negotiate a possible deal over the Iranian nuclear program.  Bolton says that fact alone makes the mullahs in Iran very uneasy.

“Iran has to worry that a newly re-elected Netanyahu, with a solid win in this election, is on a much firmer base if he decides to use force against the Iranian nuclear weapons program, as Israel has twice before done in its history against nuclear weapons programs in the hands of hostile states,” said Bolton.

“The most significant outcome is that we’re closer to a decision one way or the other, whether Israel’s going to use force,” he said.

Bolton and others warned that a Netanyahu defeat and an emboldened Iran could trigger a nuclear arms race among Arab states terrified of a nuclear Iran.  He says that threat is still possible because of the weakness of the Obama administration in confronting Iran.

“The weakness Obama has shown over these past several years in his desperate efforts to get a deal with Iran, finally convinced the likes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey that the United States was simply not going to do anything effective to stop Iran,” said Bolton.

“The act of negotiation itself helped convince the Saudis and others that they had to look out for their own interests.  I think the negotiations and the possible deal have actually accelerated the nuclear arms race in the Middle East,” he said.

March features three critical moments in the debate over Iranian nukes.  Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and his successful elections are now in the past.  Still to come is the negotiating deadline between the U.S. and Iran over a nuclear deal.

Bolton says he has a pretty good idea how that will play out in the next couple of weeks.

“This will just be an agreement in principle according to the schedule that was laid out last year.  I think it’s also possible the administration is so desperate for a deal, that if we get to the end of March and they’re not in sight of it, they will nonetheless say we’re going to keep negotiating because we’re getting close,” said Bolton, who says that would a terrible sign.

“That’s the sign of somebody who’s just willing to make more concessions.  I think that’s exactly how Iran will read it,” said Bolton.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review breathe a major sigh of relief as Benjamin Netanyahu easily survives a tough election in Israel.  They also cheer the resignation of Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock while lamenting his wasted potential.  And Jim unleashes an epic rant against the Iowa caucuses and slams Scott Walker for forcing an aide to resign over Iowa bashing.