Freedom Line Blog

While House Republicans are planning on bringing the repeal of Obamacare to a vote next week, even the staunchest opponents of the healthcare law admit that a fullblown reversal isn’t coming anytime soon.

With that in mind, healthcare analyst Avik Roy lays out the practical implications for conservatives in a piece on National Review Online. Roy is sagacious across the board, but his delineation of the consequences for the 2012 presidential election are especially pertinent — and jarring:

We must remind ourselves of the electoral realities. For Republicans to succeed in repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), they will need to control the House, the Senate, and the White House. From a political standpoint, if Republicans are not able to achieve this in 2012, they are unlikely ever to repeal Obamacare.

 This means that influential Republican activists must — must — coalesce around the most electable Republican presidential candidate who can articulate conservative health-care principles. This is no time for single-issue small-ball or personal score-settling. A GOP nominee who passes all the litmus tests but can’t win in November would only succeed in making Obamacare permanent. One who can win but isn’t capable of pushing for real health-care reform wouldn’t be much better.

Roy is right. Who the Republican nominee is in 2012 could well determine how free of a nation the United States is for the forseeable future. Vote accordingly.

File E.J. Dionne’s new column paying nominal tribute to the incoming Republican class of congressmen under articles we didn’t finish. The reason? This passage:

There is already a standard line of advice to Speaker-to-be John Boehner and his colleagues that goes like this: Democrats overreached in the last Congress by doing too much and ignoring “the center.” Republicans should be careful not to make the same mistake, lest they lose their majority, too.

This counsel is wrong, partly because the premise is faulty. Democrats did not overreach in the 111th Congress. On the contrary, they compromised regularly. Compromise made the health-care bill far more complicated than it had to be and the original stimulus bill too small. Democrats would have been better off getting more done more quickly and more coherently.

Seriously, folks … he gets paid for this.

“The American people did not vote for gridlock”

That was President Obama following his White House meeting with senior congressional leaders (including heretofore marginalized Republicans) earlier today. A few things are wrong with this:

1. Of the many tasks for which Barack Obama is demonstrably unqualified, interpreting election results is clearly towards the top of the list.

2. To the extent that the 2010 midterm elections can be boiled down to a single trend, it wasn’t the American people voting for anything — it was them voting against Obama’s agenda.

3. The American people don’t vote for process. They saw the country headed too far to the left and wanted to stop it. While the electorate may not think gridlock is ideal, they would probably prefer it over another two years like the ones we just had.

4. It’s amazing how many Democrats are spinning the 2010 elections as a mandate for the two parties to work together (not that this is a particularly innovative narrative for parties that crawl back into the minority). The 2010 election saw disgust for the two major parties at an all-time high and faith in our political institutions at an all-time low. This is just a hunch, but I don’t think the resulting message was “we’d like to see more effective cooperation between the party we hate and the party we really hate”.