Renee Ellmers on joining ObamaCare defund fight: “Absolutely Not!”

 

 

 

Regular readers of this site know we tend to be highly critical of congresswoman Renee Ellmers (R-NC-2).  Miss Renee tends to give us plenty of ammo every time she gets in front of a representative of the mainstream media — like HERE.  Her latest encounter with a McClatchy reporter did not disappoint us:

When Congress returns in September, lawmakers will have to vote on a continuing resolution to fund the federal government past the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. Without the money, much of the government would have to shut down.

Some Republicans insist that the spending bill not have any money in it to implement the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.

Ellmers has made fighting “Obamacare” her top issue. She voted with House Republicans for the 40th time on Friday to undo the health care law.

But Ellmers said she wasn’t among the House Republicans – 77, as of Friday – who signed a letter written by Rep. Mark Meadows, a Republican who represents much of Western North Carolina, that urges House Speaker John Boehner not to support any spending bill that has money for the president’s health care plan, which could possibly trigger a government shutdown.

Ellmers said she would not support such a threat.

“Absolutely not,” Ellmers said. “Why would I trade one economic disaster for another economic disaster?”

So, Renee has joined Team Burr on this matter.

ObamaCare is already driving up health care costs and choking off any hope of economic recovery.  Just wait until it actually gets implemented by Barry Obama and his IRS stooges.  

Renee’s votes for raising the debt ceiling can arguably be called an “economic disaster.”  They added trillions more debt that our children and grandchildren will be saddled with.  Her vote for the so-called “fiscal cliff” legislation jacked up spending and increased the tax burden on Americans.  Renee Ellmers has already had plenty experience with bringing on “economic disaster.”

Richard Burr, Renee Ellmers, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and other GOP establishment types are tamping down this talk of defunding ObamaCare by pointing out the alleged damage Republicans reportedly suffered during the 1995 government shutdown.

Rush Limbaugh had a great monologue recently that threw cold water on that spin:

 Let me, if I can — with some cogency and some real coherence — explain this Obamacare continuing resolution effort to defund it by even shutting down the government if you have to. September 30th is when the current continuing resolution expires. It’ll have to be renewed for the government to keep operating. It be like the nineteenth continuing resolution. We don’t have a budget, and we haven’t had one for four years.

Now, as you know, Mike Lee has a suggestion. We gotta defund Obamacare, and this is the last gasp, this is the last chance — and the last chance is to defund it — and he wants to make this move as part of the continuing resolution fight that. As part of the next continuing resolution, we defund Obamacare. Now, look. The Republican Party could just say to the country, “Look, the president just delayed Obamacare for businesses for a year to help the economy.”

That’s all they would have to say.

“Obama has delayed the employer mandate by one year in order to do two things: To help the economy and to help the Democrats’ election chances in 2014. Obamacare is an albatross around whoever’s neck that has to deal with it. So he has given businesses a one-year waiver so that they will not be harmed by it, so they will not be penalized by it. It’s a tantamount admission that Obamacare is not helpful.”

It’s a tantamount admission that Obamacare causes damage, that it causes harm. Well, Obama is out campaigning on economic growth. In order to give that a boost, he’s gotta delay a major portion of his health care law: The employer mandate. The other side of that is avoiding negatives for the Democrats going into the 2014 midterms. Well, the Republicans can say, “We want to help the economy for longer than a year.

“We’re not interested in just having the economy be given a one-year exemption from damage. We want to eliminate the damage all the way. We want the economy to grow all the time, not just one year. So we want to delay Obamacare forever and for everyone,” and there would be dancing in the streets. Tea Party people, Republican voters, and every other group of people opposed to Obamacare would be dancing in the streets.

Think: When was the last time that business and labor really agreed on anything? And it’s shaping up now that business and labor both want to do away with this law. It is a golden opportunity. But I think, in my vast experience guided by intelligence, what really scares the Republicans here is that the likelihood of this working would require a government shutdown, and that they are just terrified of one.

That scares them literally to death, because I can’t tell you… You in this audience probably know, but for those of you who were not paying close attention in 1995 for whatever reason — you weren’t old enough or you didn’t care back then — that 1995 budget battle is perhaps one of the most (if not the most) formative, negative experiences in the memory of the Republican Party at large.

Their memory of the 1995 budget battles is a series of disasters, when it wasn’t. The reason they think it was a disaster is because the media portrayed it that way. Do you remember that after the 1995 budget battle where the Republicans supposedly got shellacked, the Republicans won a bunch of seats in the Senate? I think it was six. Let me check this. Well, they held the House.

I forget how many, but they gained seats in the Senate 1996, after the 1995 budget battle. How in the world…? It is also claimed that Newt Gingrich lost his speakership because of the 1995 budget battle. That’s not why he lost his Speakership. He lost his speakership, actually, but the seeds for that sown much earlier than 1995. Newt… It’d be a distraction to go into why now, but the reasons he lost his speakership had more to do with internal House things than the 1995 budget battle.

The 1995 budget battle — on paper, at the end of the day — was not a disaster for the Republicans, but it was media-wise. The 1995 budget battle featured Republicans starving kids with the school lunch cuts that didn’t exist. There were no cuts in the school lunch program. What there was, in the ’95 budget battle, was a reduction in the rate of growth, but the amount of spending on the school lunch program was gonna increase, sizably.

But the Democrats were running around talking about Republicans starving kids, and I remember — back in 1995, folks, I was it. This is another thing for the Republicans to remember, by the way. In 1995 I was it, as far as conservative media goes. The blogosphere had not come into existence, the Internet was still essentially an infant in this regard. There were no other conservative talk shows. […]

It was still a media monopoly: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, local news, you name it.

I was it.

That’s not the case today.

There is an entire conservative media that has now been spawned as a result. Well, it’s grown. There is now a conservative media that didn’t exist in 1995. There’s a huge blogosphere, a number of conservative radio talk shows, Fox News, a number of other isolated examples of conservatism on TV. It would not be the same. The Republican leadership right now… I mean, this is so frustrating. The Republican leadership actually thinks that its problems derive from this new conservative media.

[…]

So the Republican leadership actually has an army waiting to support them that they are afraid of, that they don’t want to use. They’re embarrassed of it. Just as they’re embarrassed of their own base. But the Republicans did not lose their shirts in 1995. In addition to not losing their shirts, the 1995 budget battle set the table for welfare reform that was to come later. Bill Clinton vetoed it a number of times, eventually had to sign it into law in order to win reelection in 1996.

In terms of substance, the fights that occurred in the 1995 budget battle set the table for a lot of good policy that came out of it. The sole reason — maybe not the sole, but the dominant reason that the Republicans today live in mortal fear of a government shutdown is because they got shellacked in the media in 1995. They were accused of starving children, as just one example. Little kids in New Orleans were actually told by their teachers to write letters to members of the House. […]