The Obama Administration’s health care reform agenda is stalled, but still alive. But there is a huge change. Last year, Congressional leaders wanted the thousands of pages of complex legislation enacted before the August recess. It was urgent, they insisted, thousands were losing their coverage daily. Now, however, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has pulled a 180-degree in his quest to ramrod a massive health care bill through Congress this year. Telling reporters this week that “we’re not on health care now,” Reid gave this telling quote: “There is no …
Extending health care to the uninsured and those who can’t get coverage for pre-existing conditions is the epicenter of Democrats’ health care bills, but achieving that goal requires adding younger, healthier Americans to insurance pools to hold down costs. And achieving coverage for sicker populations comes at a significant price to young Americans, according to a recent report by Rea Hederman and Paul Winfree of Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis. Two provisions in the bills ensure that those with pre-existing conditions will be able to get coverage at an affordable …
In his State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Obama repeated his call for a tax on banks, calling it “a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need.” That sounds good, everyone agrees the taxpayer’s money should be paid back. But there’s a bit of misdirection going on here. As shown in the chart above, most big banks have already paid back the government money they received, with interest. On the other hand, most of the big companies that still owe …
Yesterday, the White House ordered the Department of Justice to begin considering places other than New York City to host the civilian criminal trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorists. The New York Times describes a decision to move the trials out of New York as “a retreat by the administration” and reported that the Obama administration “was scrambling” to find a new way forward. This latest bit of self-inflicted national security chaos comes after Obama ally New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced yesterday that he did …
Today, the Obama White House asked Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department to look for an alternative site to hold the federal trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators. In the last week, the political support for the controversial decision to hold the trial in New York City evaporated. Now, the Obama administration is scrambling to find an alternative location for the federal trial. Instead of looking for a new ZIP-code for a costly federal trial, the administration should send those detainees back to a military commission …
I have to admit that if I had been sitting in the House chamber during President Obama’s State of the Union address, I would have had to fight the urge to have a Joe Wilson moment when the President unjustly criticized the Supreme Court, six of whose members were there. Why? Because the two claims President Obama made about the Court’s decision last week in the Citizens United case are categorically and undeniably false. President Obama claimed that the Supreme Court had “reversed a century of law to open the …
President Obama gave his first State of the Union speech last night and while his delivery reminded many Americans of the man they saw on the campaign trail, his rhetoric was much of the same. Although the president did call for offshore drilling and an expansion of nuclear, his focus was clean energy jobs. He declared, But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means …
Despite the recent focus of Congress and the White House on fiscal responsibility in federal spending, passing Democrat’s health care agenda will add significantly to, not reduce, the federal deficit. Pushing Obamacare through Congress would fly directly in the face of any rhetoric spoken in favor of reducing the deficit. The necessity for Congress to raise the debt limit has spurred a nationwide conversation on the enormity of the federal debt and the recklessness of federal spending. Several proposals have been made within Congress to create commissions to suggest legislation …
On foreign policy and national defense, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address was anemic. It brushed over key issues like Iran and terrorism and skipped some important issues, like how best to handle detainees, entirely. There were, in fact, moments when the President’s rhetoric flew in the face of his actions, such as when he praised the very Iranian protestors whom had been ignored in the days after the Iranian election. Another example is that while he sounded supportive of free trade, what he said (e.g., his emphasis …
