After a five-year battle with two presidential administrations, Judicial Watch finally got notification of a large cache of documents at the Clinton Presidential Library related to Hillarycare. How large? Try 54,527 pages.

No matter what we find, this much I know: It should never have taken five years to obtain documents that were (a) 13-years-old at the time of our initial request and (b) were supremely relevant to the ongoing discussions regarding Obamacare.

We can speculate as to why the Bush administration would have refused to release the documents. Former President Bush demonstrated distaste for exposing the Clinton scandals from the get-go. Perhaps he feared retaliation by the Clinton smear machine. Or perhaps he simply wanted to move beyond the controversies of the past, as he publicly expressed. It was our experience that his administration was generally hostile to open records laws, which had the coincidental effect of helping protect him, the Clintons, and his father!

We can speculate as to why the Obama administration, the self-promoted “most transparent” administration in history, kept these documents secret until after Obamacare was signed into law. President Obama apparently wanted to avoid any comparisons between his healthcare reform initiative and that of the former First Lady, an unpopular boondoggle that nearly forced President Clinton from office. Oh, and he likely did not wish to embarrass his Secretary of State or Bill Clinton, a prolific influence peddler and money-man for the Democrats.

After all, the similarities between Hillarycare and Obamacare, both in terms of policy and in terms of execution, are many — which is not surprising, as both involve the socialist effort to have the government take over the health care industry.

July 2008, Judicial Watch did manage to force the release of some Clinton Presidential Library records related to Hillary Clinton’s healthcare campaign. (You can view them all here.) Certainly the Obama administration viewed the negative press coverage these documents earned as a threat to their drive for socialized medicine.

Check out the following excerpts from documents we uncovered and you’ll see what I mean.

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Today, Politio reported the the Congressional Democrat Leadership will increase the debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion. There was a time, in Democrat land, that Robert Rubin was thought to be an oracle. During the Clinton years, the Treasury Secretary was so highly regarded that his economic plans were dubbed Rubinomics.

Mr. Rubin, you see, despised long term deficit spending because he believed that it led to higher interest rates over time and therefore a bad economy.  It did so, in his view, because deficit spending required excessive government borrowing which adversely competed with and reduced private borrowing which, in turn, led to higher interest rates and “crowded out” private borrowing and investment.

Beyond that, according to Rubin: “ongoing deficits may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy.”  On the other hand, by eliminating deficits, the economy will improve because of lower interest rates, increased confidence and investment.

Following his lead, the Democrats raised tax rates which (a) led to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 because they all stood against tax increases, and (b) led to the highest tax burden in US history, and therefore (c) led to the recession of 1999 – which ultimately led to (d) lower revenues.

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