Freedom Line Blog

In a letter addressed to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) this week led a coalition of a half dozen prominent free-market organizations urging opposition to any legislation that grants Puerto Rico “Super Chapter 9” status. 

“‘Super Chapter 9’ would give Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla a free pass to violate Puerto Rico’s constitution, but would do nothing to bring about meaningful fiscal reform,” the letter reads.

“It is our hope that Congress will instead take the lead on this tough issue by urging the Garcia Padilla Administration to implement real fiscal reform and uphold the constitution before any consideration of restructuring the non-constitutional debt,” the letter continues.  “If necessary, Congress has the legal authority to consider measures such as a federal control board to oversee financial reform.  When, and only when, reform is enacted, Congress can then consider a process that encourages an orderly restructuring of Puerto Rico’s debts that respects the constitutionally-protected bonds and the rule of law.”

In addition to CFIF, the letter was signed by the leaders of Frontiers of Freedom, Hispanic Leadership Fund,  Institute for Liberty, National Taxpayers Union and Taxpayers Protection Alliance.   

Read the letter by clicking here (PDF).

Here’s a look at the newest Republican alternative to ObamaCare.

According to the plan’s authors – Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, plus Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina and Orrin Hatch of Utah – the plan would rein in Medicaid’s burgeoning costs by turning it into a block grant.

That’s not all.

Among other things, the Patient CARE Act would:

• Enact medical malpractice reforms to reduce frivolous lawsuits
• Require basic price transparency to inform and empower patients
• Cap the exclusion of an employee’s employer-provided health coverage
• Create a targeted tax credit to help buy health care

Billed as a “Bicameral Republican Blueprint,” this proposal has support from three powerful members of the GOP in Congress. Once they produce more details, then we’ll see how many votes they can muster.

Yesterday, three senior Republican Senators introduced a set of ideas that could eventually turn into the upper chamber’s Obamacare alternative.

The proposal – coauthored by Senators Tom Coburn (Oklahoma), Richard Burr (North Carolina) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) – is a welcome companion to the repeal and reform plan put forward by the House Republican Study Committee (RSC).

The plans share some important elements. Both would repeal Obamacare (though the Senate plan would reinstate certain Medicare changes). Both limit medical malpractice awards in an attempt to cut down on junk lawsuits. And both would increase access to various tax-shielded vehicles like Health Savings Accounts.

An interesting divergence is over whether to allow consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines. The RSC bill does, while the Coburn-Burr-Hatch proposal does not. If allowed, consumers would have more choices, including access to cheaper out-of-state plans for those living in high regulation states.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that insurance companies might cluster in a low-regulation state, leading to a domino effect where all states cut back on coverage requirements or risk losing companies to more business-friendly states. Stripped down health insurance is fine for young and healthy people, but hardly adequate for older and sicker persons. If enough people are priced out of the market, expect the liberal solution to be expanding government programs to cover them.

We know, because that’s one of the arguments liberal defenders of Obamacare used to justify its passage. As Republicans deliberate on how best to reform Obamacare after it’s repealed, figuring out a way to avoid that trap should be high on the priority list.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a column here at CFIF looking at the potential primary challenges facing two veteran Republican members of the U.S. Senate up for reelection in 2012: Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Indiana’s Richard Lugar. Both have grown long in the tooth over decades in the upper chamber; and both are regarded with suspicion by conservative activists who find their sense of principle lukewarm. The difference between the two, as I emphasized then, is how they have approached the challenge. Hatch has been doing his ready best to convince Tea Party activists that he’s an effective defender of conservative values. Lugar, on the other hand, has regarded the resistance with an attitude bordering on contempt.

While neither’s fate is yet certain, both are becoming clearer. As I mentioned on the blog last week, Utah held caucuses on Thursday that determined delegates to the party’s state convention — delegates who would select the eventual nominee for the Senate seat. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

Sen. Orrin Hatch, targeted by primary challengers and a tea party-aligned group, apparently has won a healthy share of delegates to the Utah Republican convention. That gives him a good shot at avoiding being defeated at the convention, as a Senate colleague was two years ago.

The news isn’t looking as sunny for Lugar, however. From National Journal:

A new poll … shows Republican Sen. Richard Lugar leading GOP state Treasurer Richard Mourdock by single digits, 45-39 percent.

The poll of likely Republican primary voters shows Lugar’s lead shrinking over his underdog opponent ahead of the May 8 primary. In October, Lugar led Mourdock 48 percent to 36 percent. Fifty-seven percent of likely Republican voters said they would consider another candidate or vote to replace Lugar.

In the last six weeks, Lugar’s faced an onslaught of questions from opponents and the media about his residency. He lives in northern Virginia but is registered to vote in the Hoosier state at the address of a home he sold in 1977. The state has ruled that he is eligible to run for reelection but a county elections board ruled last week that he is not eligible to vote.

This kind of trajectory — with this kind of timeframe (approximately a month and a half until primary day) — looks very bad for Lugar. So do the dynamics moving forward. There’s a natural ceiling on the number of voters who will shift their allegiance because of ideology, favoring a more conservative candidate than Lugar. But many less issue-driven voters will likely be turned off by the residency question (a similar controversy contributed to Elizabeth Dole’s loss in the general election in North Carolina in 2008).

By election day, Lugar will likely be scrounging for every vote he can get. At that point, he may come to regret devoting so much of his energy to dismissing the concerns of conservative voters.

Though you won’t hear much about it in the press, tomorrow will be a big day for the Tea Party movement. That’s because it will be the day that Republican voters caucus throughout Utah to pick their delegates to the state convention — delegates who, in turn, will choose which candidates to put on the Beehive State’s June primary ballot.

This is momentous because there’s a big push by Tea Partiers — with FreedomWorks leading the charge — to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and replace him with a more conservative alternative. This is how Politico frames it:

The group’s tactics are the latest chapter of the debate still hounding Republicans as they try to win a majority on Capitol Hill this November: Should they purge their own to find fresh blood who will be less willing to seek bipartisan compromises by straying from conservative principles? Or should they unite behind the most electable candidate and train all their fire power on Democrats?

Allow me to answer both of those questions: yes.

It’s all a matter of political prudence. One of the lessons of the 2010 midterm senate races was the importance of finding the right candidate for the right jurisdiction — and that means different things in different places. In Utah, for instance, which is the most Republican state in the nation, it was utterly sensible to replace incumbent Bob Bennett (not exactly a liberal, but not really a constitutional conservative either) with Tea Party darling Mike Lee, knowing that Lee could easily carry the general election in the fall. The Tea Party was similarly shrewd in getting behind Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Rand Paul in Kentucky.

There were a few missteps, however. The hyper-conservative Sharron Angle was a poor choice for the swing state of Nevada, where either Sue Lowden or Danny Tarkanian (both of whom would have voted as conventional conservatives) would have stood a better chance at defeating Harry Reid. Even less suited for her contest was Christine O’Donnell, the conservative firebrand running in deep-blue Delaware. O’Donnell’s primary opponent, the moderate-to-liberal Republican Mike Castle, would doubtlessly have taken many votes as a U.S. Senator that would have made conservatives squirm — but fewer than the eventual winner, Democrat Chris Coons, who Castle likely would have beaten had he been the nominee.

So what does this principle mean for Utah? Hatch, like Bennett before him, has been an able public servant, who has, most of the time, been in conservatism if not exactly of conservatism. Were he from a swing state where moving to the right could be an electoral death sentence, then that would probably be a sufficient argument for retaining him. That’s not the case in Utah, however. And the state’s conservatives are going to have a hard time turning down the opportunity to elect another senator as consistently principled in his defense of limited government as Mike Lee.

It doesn’t help either that the best argument against Hatch comes from Hatch. I’ll let Politico have the final word:

In Utah, FreedomWorks distributed a 44-page brochure to 37,000 potential convention-goers, highlighting Hatch’s positions over the years on earmarks, the bank bailout and deals with Ted Kennedy over a child health care law.

On the inside page of the brochure is a quote from Hatch during his first campaign in 1976 against 18-year incumbent Sen. Frank Moss: “What do you call a senator who’s served in office for 18 years? You call him home.”

Though Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) hasn’t exactly been the reincarnation of John Adams, some Bay State Tea Party leaders are weighing whether helping reelect the moderate Brown is better than sitting back and letting him duke it out with Harvard professor and Obama protégé Elizabeth Warren next year:

“Elizabeth Warren is a game-changer,” Varley said. “Elizabeth Warren is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive. We can say we may not be thrilled with Sen. Brown, but we certainly don’t want Elizabeth Warren.”

Unlike other GOP moderates like Senators Olympia Snowe (ME), Orrin Hatch (UT), and Richard Lugar (IN), Brown will likely get a pass in the primary, and have uber-liberal Warren to show as a much worse alternative.  Between now and November 2012, hopefully Brown gives Tea Party voters something to vote for.

H/T: FoxNews

The fight between the Tea Party and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is heating up again.  The Daily Caller says that the group quietly gave money to Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Dick Lugar (R-IN), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), among other incumbents.

Tea Party activists are claiming the NRSC is once again trying to influence GOP primaries that are likely to be contested between establishment types and newer blood fiscal conservatives.  But although Lugar has an official Tea Party opponent (Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock), no official challenger has filed paperwork against Hatch and Snowe.  (Though Rep. Jason Chaffetz is widely expected to compete against Hatch.)

The complaints of NRSC favoritism have more sway in Lugar’s case since Mourdock is actively campaigning against him.  If the Tea Party wants to make its point heard in the other cases, it better get challengers like Chaffetz to get off the fence and into the race.

For a state with an overwhelmingly Republican tilt, Utah can produce some political headscratchers. Consider:

Utah’s former governor, Jon Huntsman, is running for president as the most moderate candidate in the GOP field, despite being the former chief executive of the nation’s most Republican state. Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a hardcore conservative beloved by the Tea Party, is a former Huntsman staffer, but he’s also likely to challenge incumbent Senator Orrin Hatch next year with the argument that Hatch is too much of a RINO for residents of the Beehive State to send back to Capitol Hill. At the same time, it was announced today that Chaffetz is backing former Massachusetts governor (and one-time Utah resident) Mitt Romney for president, on the grounds that Romney is the most electable candidate in the GOP field.

It’s hard to keep all these machinations straight, but one thing’s for certain: the usually laudable Chaffetz will pay a price with his Tea Party base for coming out early for Romney. Romney’s Massachusetts health care reform was a dry run for Obamacare, right down to the individual mandate that makes tea partiers shutter.

By Chaffetz’s own admission, Romney is a friend. But while that loyalty is laudable, it need not extend to elevating Romney over other presidential contenders this early in the process.

Chaffetz claims Romney’s economic experience makes him the logical choice in 2012. For his sake, he better be right. As Mitt would probably tell him, there’s nothing worse than saddling yourself with an illiquid asset that goes bust.

You would’ve thought that the leaders of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — the Senate GOP caucus’s in-house mechanism for supporting candidates for the upper chamber — would have learned their lesson in 2010. Rather than waiting for Republican nominees to emerge before throwing their support behind them, the NRSC intervened in primaries throughout the nation, opposing such strong conservative candidates as Florida’s Marco Rubio and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey. It should have been a source of public shame. Yet it doesn’t look that way, based on a report in the New York Times’ Caucus Blog:

A group of placard-waving Tea Party activists converged on the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee early Monday afternoon, demanding that its leaders refrain from supporting incumbents facing primary challenges, and serving as a reminder that the intraparty fight over party purity continues…

One reason the activists are angry with the Republican senatorial committee is that it is holding fund-raisers for [Utah Senator Orrin] Hatch — they waved signs reading “Retire Hatch.” But more generally, they want the committee to withhold political or financial support from any incumbents in the primary.

“It’s like they haven’t learned the lessons of the midterms,” said Brendan Steinhauser, an organizer for FreedomWorks who urged on the marchers.

And indeed, the committee has heard this tune before, particularly in the 2010 Florida primary for United States Senate, when the committee initially backed Charlie Crist, then a popular Republican governor, over a scrappy challenger, Marco Rubio. Mr. Rubio did so well in polls that Mr. Crist abandoned the party, ran as an independent, and lost, badly, to Mr. Rubio, a Tea Party darling.

Of the 47 Republicans currently serving in the United States Senate, none is as likely to someday become president as Marco Rubio. And his ascendancy was nearly extinguished at the hands of the NRSC. If that isn’t a sign that they shouldn’t be weighing in during primaries, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Politico reports that the AG is being criticized as soft on pornography.

According to a letter sent to Holder by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT):

“Rather than initiate a single new case since President Obama took office, however, the only development in this area has been the dismantling of the task force. As the toxic waste of obscenity continues to spread and harm everyone it touches, it appears the Obama administration is giving up without a fight.”

Apparently, the AG isn’t content to be wrong on civilian trials for terrorists and closing down the Guantanamo Bay military prison.  Now, he wants to stir up a fight on an issue the Obama Administration can’t win.

For the sake of everyone involved, President Barack Obama needs to fire this man.

Yesterday, CFIF Senior Fellow Troy Senik described the different approaches Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) are taking toward their state’s Tea Party movements.  Hatch is accommodating while Lugar is dismissive.

Count Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) in the Hatch camp.  The Maine moderate is raising the eyebrow of one home-state commentator by giving a lengthy response to questions about opposing Sharia law, repealing ObamaCare, increasing the debt ceiling, and Social Security spending, among other issues.

Snowe should get credit for answering those questions publicly and in-depth.  Time will tell if it helps her win another term in 2012.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) today introduced two new pieces of legislation to repeal the most troubling provisions of ObamaCare. 

“The first, The American Liberty Restoration Act (S. 3502), would repeal the individual mandate that Hatch has repeatedly called unconstitutional and has prompted lawsuits by over 20 states. The second, the American Job Protection Act (S.3501), would repeal the job-killing employer mandate that Hatch says would force more layoffs and increase taxes on businesses at a time of near 10 percent unemployment,” reads a press statement released by the Senator’s office.

On the individual mandate, Senator Hatch said:

Congress overstepped its authority by telling Americans that they have to buy health insurance or else.  The Constitution empowers Congress to regulate interstate commerce, but does not tell Americans what they must buy. It’s time to repeal this unconstitutional Washington mandate that encroaches on the principle of federalism and Utahns’ personal liberty.”

On the employer mandate, Hatch noted:

The employer mandate would force businesses to let people go or raise the cost of doing business to such an extent that they don’t start hiring. This doesn’t make any sense at any time, but especially when our nation’s unemployment rate remains stuck around ten percent.  Let’s repeal this job-killing provision so businesses can back in the business of hiring.”

It’s time to light up the Capitol switchboard, folks.  Both S. 3502 and S.3501 are more than worthy and in need of your support!