Republicans Against Repeal

This article makes me sick. Just because there are a few good things in the bill, it does not mitigate the damage that will be done to our economy and society when taxes skyrocket, 159 new federal bureaucracies are established and our health care and innovation are in the toilet.

Excerpt: Well, that didn't take long. After Democratic supermajorities rammed through their health care bill, Republicans were full of sound and fury about how this injustice will not stand. Even John McCain was on board, telling a television interviewer, "Outside the Beltway the American people are very angry and they don't like it and we are going to try to repeal this."

But in the GOP, cooler heads always prevail. What these Republican heads want to cool down is the campaign to repeal the health care takeover. Reports the Associated Press: "Top Republicans are increasingly worried that GOP candidates this fall might be burned by a fire that's roaring through the conservative base: demand for the repeal of President Barack Obama's new health care law."

Then again, this appears to be the working definition of conservatism embraced by most GOP politicians. Republicans campaign on canceling spending programs, shutting down government agencies, and overturning Roe v. Wade. But once safely in office, they tend to leave most liberal handiwork alone, failing to repeal even Bill Clinton's tax increases. Occasionally they add a few big-government flourishes of their own -- a new entitlement to enlarge Medicare's unfunded liabilities here, a record increase in federal education spending there.

When David Frum blogs about the Republican pedigree of some ideas in the Democratic health care bill and suggests Republican snouts should have found their way to the trough, there is outrage. When Republicans actually govern this way, too often there is silence -- eerily like the hush that falls over antiwar protests after Democrats are elected on promises to end wars, even though the wars still continue.

If Republicans cannot repeal an unpopular bill where many of the costs are front-loaded, many of the benefits are yet to come, and where the creation of another entitlement is as detrimental to their own partisan self-interest as it is to the nation's finances, then conservatives cannot count on Republicans to undo very much of what they routinely denounce and campaign against.

The Republican Party will simply be the saucer that cools the Tea Party. Cooler heads will have prevailed -- and so will have liberalism. Read full article here.