Help me out with this.
Why are we still arguing about Obamacare — in 2015? Why haven’t conservatives even voted on a replacement? Could it be that the plan inspired by the guy we nominated for president in 2012 isn’t exactly pure, distilled communism?
As I read the coverage of the Supreme Court arguments in the case of King v. Burwell, I had to ask myself, “What exactly are we cheering for here?”
The best case scenario is millions of Americans will lose their tax credits and won’t be able to afford health insurance.
If you believe in the free market, you know that lack of demand will send up the cost for everyone else but Obamacare will still be there. The people who’ll suffer most will be middle-class taxpayers in states that vote Republican. Take that, Obama!
I’ll put my conservative credentials up against anyone.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve written in Ronald Reagan’s name for every office in every municipal, state, and national election since 1988. Living in New York state, which has voted Democrat since the greatest president America has ever known left office, it’s my one electoral pleasure.
But I can’t help but wonder what Mr. Reagan would think about a party that’s turned “Amnesty” into a dirty word, a party that has to be tricked into funding Homeland Security, a party that is crossing its fingers hoping that people who just got health insurance might lose it. We’re refusing Medicaid expansion for millions of Americans with jobs, even though Reagan expanded Medicaid.
Even the logic of the lawsuit doesn’t make sense. We’re arguing that a law that made such onerous, heinous threats to states to force them to take Medicaid expansion they were considered unconstitutional also contained a super secret threat that no one discovered until years later? And the lawyer behind it says he’s inspired by Atticus Finch?
My fellow Republicans on Wall Street have been through a miserable decade, even though we were sucking up cash the way a street sweeper sucks leaves the whole time.
During the financial crisis, even Alan Greenspan seemed to think we needed a few regulations. Our guys said the Stimulus and the Fed’s rampant bond buying would turn the dollar into the peso. Then Obamacare was supposed to be the cherry on the financial apocalypse sundae.
Instead, 2014 was the first year since 1984 when every state in the union and the District of Columbia saw their unemployment rate go down.
Do you know who was president in 1984?
And what are we doing while all of our best economists are praying for the economy to slow down before 2016? Avoiding questions about evolution? Using snowballs as scientific evidence? Suggesting prison makes people gay? Proposing more tax cuts for guys like me? Opposing stem-cell research? Surrendering America’s lead in biomedical research?
Are we trying to be a Cloyd Rivers-type parody of ourselves?
My parents — who now run a Bed and Breakfast in southern Ohio — started watching Fox News a decade ago after losing a bet. Last week, I told them is that I think beachfront property is a risky investment because the ocean is rising. They Facetimed me to tell me that I may be a socialist and then emailed me a meme of Al Gore and George Soros taking a bubble bath together.
Some truths are inconvenient.
Benghazi was a disaster. But there was a Benghazi almost every day in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade. Putin is a maniac and Iran is a menace. But Bush vouched for Putin’s heart, let North Korea get nuclear weapons and refused the kind of nuclear deal with Iran that conservatives say they want today. And now we’re supposed to believe the solution to all these problems is another Bush.
I didn’t leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left me — and Mr. Reagan.
