During his State of the Union address, the President said, “If you have ideas on how to improve this law by making care better or more affordable, I am eager to work with you.”

Mr. President, I accept your invitation. As a small business owner, I know the devastating impact the current law will have on our economy. We all agree that the system is broken and health care reform is necessary. I would love to speak with you about the concerns I have with the law and work together to create health care solutions that serve all Americans. I’m eager to begin the dialogue and work with you to give consumers more choice in their health care decisions.

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From Politico:

House Republicans passed a bill to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care plan Wednesday, taking their first major step toward rolling back the massive overhaul that has dominated the American political landscape for almost two years.

The vote was 245 to 189, and unanimous GOP support gave the vote the same partisan feel of the March vote to pass the law, underscoring once again the hardened political lines of the health care debate. Only three Democrats backed the repeal, a smaller number than Republicans had once predicted.

The bill will head next to the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has promised to block it. If it did receive a vote, the repeal bill would be unlikely to draw support from even a majority of senators. Even so, House Republican leaders have challenged Reid to give the bill a vote since Democrats, who control the chamber, have little to fear.

Republicans rejected a procedural maneuver by the Democratic minority to make repeal ineffective unless a majority of the House and Senate withdraw from the federal health benefits program within 30 days after passage by each chamber.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the effort was “an attempt to derail an appeal of the Obamacare bill.”

House members flooded the floor throughout the day, delivering short but occasionally impassioned speeches that echoed their party’s talking points.

Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) called the law “a trillion-dollar tragedy.”

Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.) described it as “job-killing” and “socialistic.”

Rep. Kevin Duncan (R-Texas) said “health care is too important to get it wrong, and Obamacare got it wrong.”

But Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) took the debate to a new level late Tuesday night, suggesting to an empty House floor that Republican rhetoric around health care reform is akin to Nazi propaganda that fed anti-Semitism during World War II.

Read the whole thing here. Apparently, Rep. Cohen didn’t get the memo about the new emphasis on ‘civility.’ Doesn’t the left get bored with the “nazi” analogies. Anything else in their book of tricks?

From Reuters:

The House of Representatives will resume debate next week on legislation to repeal President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare overhaul, a House Republican spokesman said on Thursday.

The House had been expected to act this week on the repeal bill, but the vote was postponed after a shooting spree in Arizona killed six people and critically wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Debate on the healthcare bill will resume next week, said Brad Dayspring, spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

A vote on repeal is set for Wednesday.

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While the new Congress deliberates over ways to repeal or defund the Obama Administration’s “healthcare reform” law, twenty states and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), have filed suit in federal court arguing that the law is unconstitutional and should be struck down immediately. This is the largest of several legal challenges to Obamacare across the country.

Lawyers for NFIB and the states will appear in a Pensacola, Florida federal court this Thursday, December 16th.  They will ask U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson to rule that the heart of the law – and “individual mandate” that obligates private citizens to obtain health insurance whether they want it or not – is unconstitutional.  NFIB and the states will accordingly ask that Judge Vinson to strike down Obamacare in its entirety.

The Constitution does not allow Congress to force Americans to purchase a product solely because they are alive and the federal government’s claim of such authority contradicts more than two hundred years of Supreme Court precedent.  Yet the individual mandate, which would obligate private citizens to obtain health insurance whether they want it or not, does just that.

Counsel for NFIB and the states will make the following arguments:

1) The Individual Mandate in Unconstitutional

Under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power to regulate people when they engage in an economic activity that affects interstate commerce.

The Obama Administration argues that choosing not to purchase something (like a health insurance policy) is somehow an “activity” that affects the economy.  The federal government’s theory that a decision to do nothing is “activity” that may be regulated by Congress under the Commerce Clause is unprecedented. The Administration’s lawyers have been unable to identify a single pre-Obamacare decision upholding a law that forces a private individual to enter into a market for goods or services against their will.

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Yes, I’m serious.

Why is Mitt Romney even in the running, when healthcare played such an important role in the mid-term elections as noted by Rasmussen:

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of those who voted in today’s elections nationwide favor repeal of the national health care bill passed by congressional Democrats in March, including 48% who Strongly Favor it.

Rasmussen Reports telephone surveying nationwide after the polls closed found that 40% are opposed to repeal, with 32% who Strongly Oppose it.

This mirrors what we have found every week in surveys since March.

Romney, as most know, is the one-term governor of Massachusetts and the creator of RomneyCare.  With two Massachusetts’s miracles for the state, a trifecta may be a tall order when presented on the national stage for the presidency–especially when Republican Senator Scott Brown, also from MA, has some questionable leanings.

But, then again, maybe not.

Quinnipiac released its latest poll showing Romney, ahead of former Governor Mike Huckabee, and edging out President Obama in 2012:

In trial heats for 2012, former Massachusetts Gov. Romney receives 45 percent to 44 percent for Obama, while the president gets 46 percent to 44 percent for Mr. Huckabee. Matched against Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a virtual unknown to most voters, the president leads 45 – 36 percent.

Romney and Obama do matchup well, but maybe on the same side of the aisle as Romney is quite RINOish.  In addition to their love of government-run healthcare, Obama and Romney do have some other public relations commonality; they play to the ignorance of the people by capitalizing on their popularity.

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As Epstein told Reason in a 1995 interview, “I took some pride in the fact that [Sen.] Joe Biden (D-Del.) held a copy of Takings up to a hapless Clarence Thomas back in 1991 and said that anyone who believes what’s in this book is certifiably unqualified to sit in on the Supreme Court. That’s a compliment of sorts…. But I took even more pride in the fact that, during the Breyer hearings [in 199X], there were no such theatrics, even as the nominee was constantly questioned on whether he agreed with the Epstein position on deregulation as if that position could not be held by responsible people.”

Born in New York in 1943, Epstein splits faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and New York University; he’s also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to Reason. In books such as Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992) to Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), and Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003), Epstein pushes his ideas and preconceptions to their limits and takes his readers along for the ride. A die-hard libertarian who believes the state should be limited and individual freedom expanded, he is nonetheless the consummate intellectual who first and foremost demands he offer up ironclad proofs for his characteristically counterintuitive insights into law and social theory.

Indeed, Epstein’s enduring value may not be any particular legal or policy prescription he’s offered over the years but rather his methodology. He believes in robust and unfettered argument and debate as a way of gaining knowledge. If you don’t put your ideas out in the arena, you can’t be doing your best work, he argues. “The problem when you keep to yourself is you don’t get to hear strong ideas articulated by people who disagree with you,” he says.

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This past Monday, we trained our guns on the SS Obamacare; we aimed for the waterline.  The smoke hasn’t yet cleared, but we’re pretty sure it’s taking on water in a big way.  Our case attacking the constitutionality of Obamacare is in the federal District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.  The government filed a motion to have our case dismissed, and yesterday we filed our response, which can be found here:  Response to Government’s Motion to Dismiss

Judge Keith Starret will now have to decide many issues, including whether the individual mandate is a tax or a penalty.   On October 14, Florida’s Attorney General received a powerful ruling in his state’s attack on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) from the federal District Court for the Northern District of Florida.  The opinion in that case says that the “individual mandate” is a penalty, not a tax.  That ruling is vital, because the Constitution gives Congress a great deal of power when it comes to taxing us, but not nearly so much when it comes to penalizing us.  There’s also a very old statute called the Anti-Injunction Act that the government is using as a defense, which only applies to lawsuits against taxes.

In short, the government is saying “we win because this is a tax.”  The only problem is that the mandate is quite clearly not a tax.  The individual mandate is simply a command by our government that each individual who does not have health insurance coverage go out and buy it, whether he or she wants it or not.  This dictate is enforced with a penalty — either buy the insurance, or face the penalty.  Congress specifically called this provision a “penalty” eighteen different times in Section 5000A alone; not one time in over 2,700 pages did Congress ever refer to it as a “tax.”   Even President Obama has insisted that the individual mandate is not a tax.

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111 companies and organizations were granted waivers by Obama’s Dept. of Health and Human Services so that they could get out of having to comply with Obamacare and unions were particularly well rewarded by the HHS with these waivers.

Interestingly, there was no great announcement of these waivers issued to the press. The HHS buried the waiver announcement six layers deep on its webpage and posted them on Friday when they imagined no one would notice. It’s a typical Friday evening document dump so common when an administration wants to avoid the prying eyes of the people. So much for the “most transparent administration in history,” eh?

One thing is sure about these waivers. Obama rewarded his union pals quite well. Som 15 unions and union healthcare or financial fund and insurance providers fill the list of companies and groups that will not have to operate under Obamacare’s destructive rules.

• The Service Employees Benefit Fund
• United Food and Commercial Workers Allied Trade Health & Welfare Trust Fund
• International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union No. 195
• Asbestos Workers Local 53 Welfare Fund
• Employees Security Funds
• Plumbers & Pipefitters Local 123 Welfare Fund
• United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227
• United Food and Commercial Workers Maximus Local 455
• Service Employees International Union Local 25
• United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1262
• Musicians Health Fund Local 802
• Hospitality Benefit Fund Local 17
• Transport Workers Union
• United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund
• International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (AFL-CIO)

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With the mauling of the Democrats, their ideology, and policies, in addition to some RINOS in the primaries, let’s hope the new Congress heard Americans loud and clear on Tuesday and the United States government is no longer a punchline, and will return to sound fiscal and free market policies without the need for earmarks, bribes, pork, class warfare, and rhetoric to sell and brand bills.

[

Since when did it become OK to run right over the majority views of the American people?

Since never.

When Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid decided it was more important to cut deals with interest groups and each other to pass the Health Care Act than actually follow the will of the people, they betrayed their oaths of office— and they betrayed us.

At every turn Americans were misled in the politician’s zeal to deliver a brand new social program to make citizens dependent on government—and entirely political—decisions about health care. Well, here’s a little news flash for Washington power brokers, pundits and political schemers–in politics we have the last word and we will on ObamaCare.

They said that health care costs would be controlled—they weren’t. They said that taxes and private insurance premiums won’t go up—they are. They said that healthcare won’t be rationed—it will. They said that this will help, not hurt, the national economy and the national debt—it won’t.

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Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what you want to call it. Today the Editors of Time Magazine will be “eating their words” of May 2009 when they declared the Republican Party an endangered species. They will have company at their feast, the Editors of Newsweek who declared that we are all socialists now.  Both of those concepts were killed off tonight.

This was the biggest transfer of power in the House since 1948. Nancy Pelosi will no longer be (as she once described herself) the most powerful woman in the world. As for the Senate it has been over a month since all but the most partisan analyst have given the GOP a real chance of winning the Senate.

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If Obamacare is completely implemented, doctors will no longer be practicing medicine. They will instead become the drones tasked with deciding who gets the meager healthcare crumbs doled out by the bureaucrats who have the ultimate power over patient life and death. Those who are deemed to have illnesses that require treatments which are not cost effective can expect a one way ticket to a hospice.

Like so many bills passed by Congress, there was a hidden provision in the Stimulus bill passed in 2009. It spends 1.1 billion dollars to create an important piece of the framework for the healthcare bill called the Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. It is based on the false premise that doctors in consultation with their patients don’t have the ability to make the right healthcare choices (see executive summary). The council consists of 15 people appointed by the President.

They all have one thing in common–they are all isolated from day to day patient care; and therefore, are insulated from the real practice of the art of medicine. It makes it easy to see patients as a cost center to be controlled. With views of members like Dr Emanuel, who champions the complete-lives system, it is hard to ignore the probability that senior citizens, those with chronic illness, and the very young will be on the outside looking in. This council is another example of the people of this country being told by the government that it knows what is best for us.

The framework set up by the stimulus bill merely set the stage for the implementation found in the healthcare reform bill. How can the government get doctors to participate in Obamacare thereby a) willingly destroying the doctor patient relationship, and  b) betraying their Hippocratic Oath to provide treatments that they deem to be effective? Simple – fear and intimidation.

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By now, your mail man… excuse me, mail person, is probably cursing every politician and special interest group out flooding mailboxes with mailers telling you how to vote. Your email inbox is full, and “Robocalls”, those annoying automated phone calls that seem to always come in the middle of dinner, are imparting their recorded wisdom.

Talk show hosts are telling you exactly what you should do, and the people around you are constantly trying to get you to vote their way.

Congratulations, you just became a member of Congress.

Alright, maybe not really, but in a sense, you are going through one day of what goes on for voting members of congress every day of the year. Lobbyists, other politicians, talking heads, etc are constantly trying to sway the congressional members to vote their way.

The result is that they don’t always fully understand what they are voting for, or why. They go along with their influences and vote in accordance, completely forsaking thier duties and responsibilities.

The notorious health care bill was passed by a large amount of people who never read the bill. It is what is helping to spur the Tea Party movement, and energize conservative voters to get out this election and make their voice heard. Chants of “Read the Bill” have been heard at rallies around the nation in protest of the audacity of congress to vote on something they don’t understand…

… But have you done the same?

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On Wednesday The Hill reported on a new poll it has conducted of the 2010 midterms with initial focus on 12 districts held by freshmen Democrats and the news isn’t good for those incumbent Dems scrutinized. On the other hand, the poll seems to show that it isn’t pat that Republicans will necessarily run away with it all either.

On Wednesday The Hill reported that in 11 of the initial 12 races polled, Republicans are leading Democrat incumbents. In the 12th, the candidates are tied. While this may seem good for the GOP the downside is that none of the Republicans are polling over 50%.

However, a long held axiom states that an incumbent that can’t reach at lest 50% in the polls generally is in major trouble for re-election and if these polls show GOP leads in each case with not one of these incumbent Dems reaching the 50% mark, that says quite a lot about these midterms.

According to The Hill, the poll also shows that Obamacare is hurting Democrats. “A majority of voters in key battleground districts favor repeal of the legislative overhaul that Congress passed this year.”

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I don’t know why presidents agree to interviews with Rolling Stone. The mag is biased against presidents and you never come off well. Remember how it treated Bush?

Bush Apologizes: The Farewell Interview We Wish He’d Give -W. comes clean – on his dad, Condi’s farts and the time Dick waterboarded the house boy

That is some high class comedy. No wonder Rolling Stone does so well in the “teenage boys who can burp the A-B-Cs demo.”

Then there was the cover photo showing Bush as a dunce. Ha! I get it! Bush is dumb. Hilarious. Never heard that one.

With that history, Obama had to be ready for a grilling. Here are some of the bare knuckles, no holds barred questions The One had to face:

When you came into office, you felt you would be able to work with the other side. When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?

How do you feel about the fact that day after day, there’s this really destructive attack on whatever you propose? Does that bother you? Has it shocked you?

What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?

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One of the chief responsibilities of the Congress is the provide oversight of the executive branch — a responsibility that the Democrat Congress has punted. The president nominated Donald Berwick to head the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid, a proponent of rationing for the poor and elderly. Not only did the Congress not hold a single hearing about Berwick’s support for a government-run health care system, they never voted on his nomination. Berwick now heads an agency bigger than the Department of Defense without so much as a question being asked about his qualifications and extreme views.

Berkwick’s support for the imposition of a British-style health care system complete with its rationing regime is clear. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care–the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open,” Berwick said in a June 2009 interview with Biotechnology Healthcare.

In an interview last June, Dr. Berwick said, “NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious, valuable, and — importantly — knowledge-building system.” He added that NICE has “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.” Moments later, the interviewer asked, “So you are saying that the federal CER [Comparative Effectiveness Research] agency should get involved in cost determinations?” Berwick replied, “You can say, ‘Well, we shouldn’t even look.’ But that would be irrational. The social budget is limited.” NICE is the government agency in Britain that rations care on a daily basis. Professor Mike Rawlins, the chairman the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) who said: “The question is not whether care is rationed but how.”

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I recently attended in Washington, D. C. an insightful debate, “How to Interpret the Constitution.” I asked each of four panelists to opine on the constitutionality of the individual mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health care beginning 2014.  Two thought the mandate constitutional; two did not.

John Yoo, a former official at the U. S. Department of Justice and presently a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that the U. S. Supreme Court would rule “5 to 4” against the constitutionality of the mandate.

Stephen Markman, now Justice on the Michigan Supreme Court, did not make a prediction, but implied hope that the mandate would be ruled unconstitutional.  He argued that never in its history has any federal court ruled that the Commerce Clause permits the government to regulate economic inactivity and to require all individuals to buy a certain private sector product or service.

Mark Hall, professor of law at Wake Forest University and a conservative, predicted that Justice Antonin Scalia would rule the individual mandate constitutional.  He based his view on what he had learned in taking a law class from Scalia and on Scalia’s position in the Raich case (2005).

Angel Raich argued that she grew marijuana in her own back yard for personal medical use only.  Nonetheless, Scalia sided with the majority against Raich, concurring that her personal, noneconomic, noncommercial activities, “taken in the aggregate, substantially affect interstate commerce” and therefore can be regulated by the Commerce Clause.  If others grew marijuana, in the aggregate commerce in the future would emerge.

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The Obama-Pelosi Regime took control of one-sixth of the nation’s economy when they passed their nationalized health care bill and signed it into law in late March. The bill was never popular but Democrats persisted and rammed the bill through Congress. Now, there are even reports that the Obama Administration sat on damning information and hid it from the public until after their bill was passed into law.
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Results from a report released a month after the health care vote were troubling. The report released by Medicare and Medicaid actuaries showed that medical costs will skyrocket rising $389 billion 10 years. 14 million will lose their employer-based coverage. Millions of Americans will be left without insurance. And, millions more may be dumped into the already overwhelmed Medicaid system. 4 million American families will be hit with tax penalties under this new law.

Of course, these were ALL things that President Obama and Democratic leaders assured us would not happen.

Via Special Report:

Six months after democrats voted to take over the nation’s health care industry and force Americans to purchase their government plan the administration has already missed several deadlines. Here are a few stats on this awful bill:

–4,103 – Pages of regulations issued on the health care law through Sept. 17, 2010
–12 – Number of final regulations not subjected to public scrutiny before taking effect
–5 – Missed implementation deadlines to date.

Rep. Michael Burgess M.D. (R-TX), the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Regulations called for Secretary Sebelius to come before the committee and explain some of her troubling comments and the flawed bill.

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Today is the six-month anniversary of the passage of President Obama’s signature legislation, what has come to be known as ObamaCare.  The White House is feting this semi-anniversary, but few Americans are in a mood to join the celebration.

Obama, who can be thin-skinned when people disagree with him, was downright irritated when the early polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed his health care “reform” bill.  On April 1, he criticized the polls as premature, saying “So before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place.  Just a thought.”

The problem with his argument is that the more Americans find out what is actually in this monstrosity of a bill, the less they like it.  Polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports show that 55 percent of the public supported the repeal of ObamaCare on March 25, just two days after its passage.  Today, a half-year later, the number of those favoring repeal has grown to 61 percent.

I am not one to call the President a liar.  I have too much respect for the office held by giants like George Washington and Ronald Reagan for that.  But I do believe that much of what Obama has said about his own health care bill is simply not true.  He claimed in Maine that people could keep their own health insurance, in Maryland that people could keep their own doctors.  In Washington, DC, he promised that his plan would cut costs but would not lead to the rationing of care.  He has consistently claimed that it would not fund abortions, and that its “end-of-life visits” would not lead to euthanasia.

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President Obama unveiled his latest economic proposal in Cleveland recently in a desperate attempt to boost the Democrats’ fleeting hopes of maintaining control of Congress this November.  But after two years of massive government spending and job-killing policies, the damage has already been done and it’s clear this fall’s election will be boiled down to a simple choice: job killers versus job creators.

With unemployment at 9.6%, the American people are clamoring for candidates with a solutions-oriented agenda for job creation as an alternative to the job-killing policies of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini described it this way: “I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs.  And I think they’re flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working.”

Simply put, candidates who propose job-creating policies and show how their opponent’s policies are killing jobs will win decisively in 2010.

American Solutions has already put forth its Jobs Here, Jobs Now, Jobs First plan, so let’s examine the top 10 job-killing policies of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine.

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