Showing posts with label John Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Lewis. Show all posts

Friday, March 24, 2017

House Freedom Caucus' Meadows was one of just 7 Republicans to vote against the 2015 Obamacare repeal

Meadow's leadership against the current repeal bill, which is in fact a crummier bill, obscures his isolation previously. 

The roll call vote is here. Buck, Dold, Hanna, Jones, Meadows, Salmon, and Walker voted No. The majority of the Freedom Caucus voted for the bill, including leaders like Justin Amash and Jim Jordan.

Unlike Meadows, Americans for Tax Reform here also supported the bill at the time, as did the broader Republican Caucus in the House (it passed 240-189). ATR acknowledged the difficulty of repealing Obamacare's policy provisions without 60 votes in the Senate, which remains the problem now in 2017.

Jim Jordan is right. Repass H.R. 3762 and send it to Trump.

From ATR:

H.R. 3762 repeals most of the heart of Obamacare. The individual and employer mandates and their attendant tax penalties are gone. The medical device tax is repealed. The “Cadillac plan” excise tax is prevented from coming into effect (more on that later).

On the spending side, H.R. 3762 repeals some unaccountable Obamacare slush funds, shutters IPAB (the Medicare rationing board that Sarah Palin called a “death panel”), and ends Obamacare auto-enrollment. Importantly, it also defunds Planned Parenthood for the fiscal year.

At a markup for the bill, liberal Congressmen went apoplectic at the effect H.R. 3762 would have on Obamacare. Top House Ways and Means Democrat Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) said that the bill ”effectively guts [Obamacare].” Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) said, “this bill really is pulling the legs from under [Obamacare]. It is a deliberate, systematic attempt, not just to repeal, but to destroy [Obamacare].” ...

When the Republicans took the Senate in the 2014 elections, there was a lot of talk about moving bills from Capitol Hill to the President’s desk to force showdowns with the White House. That hasn’t happened, largely because Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has bottled up the Senate in 60 vote purgatory.

The one area he cannot do that is on a privileged budget reconciliation bill like H.R. 3762.



Monday, January 16, 2017

John Lewis' boycott of the inaugural isn't unprecedented, nor the reason for it: He also boycotted G. W. Bush

WaPo reported this Sunday, Jan. 21, 2001, here:

Some members of the Black Caucus decided to boycott Inauguration Day; John Lewis, for instance, spent the day in his Atlanta district. He thought it would be hypocritical to attend Bush's swearing-in because he doesn't believe Bush is the true elected president.

Rand Paul: John Lewis isn't immune from criticism just because he's a civil rights icon

No, he's immune because he's BLACK, but Rand Paul won't say that.

Rand Paul, quoted here:

[B]eing a civil rights icon ... I would also say that that doesn't make us immune from criticism or debate. So, John Lewis isn't in a position where there can't be a healthy debate back and forth. Because he's a civil rights icon shouldn't make him immune. ...  I should be able to honestly disagree with him, and not have it all come back to, I have no appreciation for a civil rights icon because of this. And I think that's the part that I think is sometimes unfair in this.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Nebraska's Republican Senator Ben Sasse crawls out from underneath his rock to support John Lewis over Trump

First!

Liberal preening.


Sasse appears to be the only Republican publicly critical of the president-elect's attack so far.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Freedom Caucus caves, Paul Ryan elected Speaker of the House

Ryan received 236 votes for the Speakership on the floor of the House this morning, Nancy Pelosi 184. 432 votes out of 435 were cast. I'm assuming Boehner, Pelosi and Ryan didn't vote.

The Republican Caucus in the House numbers 247 in the 114th Congress. The Democrats 188.

Story here.

45 Republicans voted against Ryan yesterday in caucus, but today Florida Republican Dan Webster received just 9 votes of the 12 cast for candidates other than Ryan and Pelosi (Webster voted for himself?).

Blue Dog Democrat Jim Cooper (TN), Democrat John Lewis (GA) and Colin Powell (!) each received one vote.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Left's Anti-American Slander

When leftists and socialists compare Americans who believe in limited government to Nazis, they forget that many of them had fathers who left wives and children behind to join in the effort to defeat Hitler. To such Americans, the comparison is an outrage, and the left would do well not to underestimate the consequences of stoking this anger. The following appeared here:


March 31, 2010

The Hostility Follies

By Jonah Goldberg

Apparently there's a self-proclaimed militia leader named Mike Vanderboegh who runs an obscure, low-traffic blog out of Pinson, Ala. (population 5,007). Mr. Vanderboegh recently called on his fellow "sons of liberty" to break the windows of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform.

So let's start with the obvious: Vanderboegh is an idiot, and anyone who followed his advice is an idiot too. These people are buffoons, not just because such tactics help Democrats but because such behavior is simply wrong, reprehensible and clownish.

Equally wrong, reprehensible and clownish: The reaction to Vanderboegh and his alleged ilk.

The Daily Beast's John Avlon insists that Vanderboegh's rallying cry, combined with some threats and broken windows, make "the parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis' heinous 1938 Kristallnacht . . . hard to ignore."

Actually, it's really, really easy to ignore the parallels. During Kristallnacht, Nazi goons destroyed not just 7,000 store windows but hundreds of synagogues and thousands of homes. Tens of thousands of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps by the Nazis, who had been in total power for half a decade.

This combination of state power and murderous, genocidal intent is nowhere on display in America today, not in the Obama administration (contrary to what some overheated right-wingers claim) and certainly not among out-of-power conservatives and "tea partyers." It's amazing anyone needs to point this out, but a few libertarians throwing bricks is not the same thing as the tightening fist of the Third Reich. Indeed, it's an anti-American slander to suggest anything like it is going on here, and it cheapens the moral horror of the Holocaust.

Don't tell that to the Democrats and their media transmission belt, who largely turned a blind eye to partisan vandalism and extremist rhetoric against Republicans for eight years but now express horror at what they claim to hear from the right.

Columnist Paul Krugman, who encouraged liberals to hang Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in effigy, is concerned about right-wing "eliminationist rhetoric." The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy can't stand the incivility of the tea partyers, which is why he wants to "knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads." Frank Rich says the mantra "take our country back" is now code for a white racist backlash -- though it was an apparently fine Democratic applause line when George W. Bush was president.

So what's the evidence for this new reign of terror? Those broken windows, some nasty voice and e-mail messages (not counting those aimed at Republicans, naturally), a coffin "left" at a Missouri congressman's home, a few repugnant signs at rallies and allegations from Reps. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.)and John Lewis (D-Ga.) that they were spit on and insulted with the "N-word," respectively.

But wait. The coffin was part of a protest over the death of "our freedoms" and was toted by the protesters, not left anywhere. And videos make it clear that what Cleaver called spitting was a protester spraying too much saliva while talking, the racist pig.

As for the epithet aimed at Lewis, if it happened, it's disgusting. But going by the video, there's nothing to back it up, and Rep. Andre Carson's (D-Ind.) claim that the N-word was chanted 15 times is pure dishonesty.

Let's assume it is true. I thought liberals rejected guilt by association as McCarthyism. Or are we to believe that every opponent of Obamacare is a racist?

On March 3, Politico broke a story about a leaked PowerPoint presentation delivered at a GOP retreat in Florida. It laid out, in cartoonish terms, a fundraising strategy exploiting "fear" of President Obama's "socialist" agenda. Ranking Republicans condemned and repudiated it.

Now, Obama's political arm, Organizing for America, is fundraising based on fear, sending out e-mails insinuating that Republicans are unleashing a lynch mob to repeal Obamacare. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Democrats' Congressional Campaign Committee, insists we all should be very scared.

Heaven forbid anyone suggest a coordinated strategy is at work here. That would be distracting us from the Kristallnacht unfolding before our eyes.