Politics / The Great Patriotic War
Norquist, Grover G.
The Great Patriotic War by Grover G. Norquist 0 n Monday, October 4, House minority leader Bob Michel (RIM) announced that he would not run for another congressional term. Jerry Solomon of New...
...Gingrich says that the "health care debate is the decisive battle about whether we become a free society or become a socialist state...
...Washington, which today claims control of 25 percent of the nation's economy, will soon control 100 percent of your health...
...Forty-seven percent believe the plan will hurt "people like them...
...For just twelve days earlier, Bill Clinton had announced his plan to have the government take over the health-care industry...
...NFIB understands it must make the case that a "mandate" is just another word for a tax...
...The Clinton plan, he says, "will transfer so much money and power to the government that it would change the nation...
...juncture—on the eve of what is to be the decisive congressional battle over what kind of government and society Americans are going to have...
...Tom DeLay of Texas, Bill McCollum of Florida, and Bob Walker of Pennsylvania, all conservatives, are vying to replace Gingrich as whip...
...And the National Federation of Independent Businesses understands that big business will be bought off by the Clinton agreements to have taxpayers take over General Motors' early retirees' health costs, and that small business must fight the plan alone, without expecting help from the U.S...
...With a shrinking political infrastructure and a discredited ideology, the Clintons have decided to attack...
...And despite conservative frustration at the failure of initiatives in Colorado and Oregon, liberals know that the fight for school choice is like a nuclear attack .. . you only have to get one through the defenses...
...While the timing of Michel's announcement was driven by Illinois, filing deadlines, it came at an important Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Choice will undermine the monopoly of 3 million unionized school teachers who, through the National Education Association, provide millions in political cash and plenty of well-distributed muscle into every congressional district...
...One hundred thirty House Republicans, including Gingrich and Michel, have cosponsored similar legislation with their Affordable Health Care Now Act...
...Only 19 percent believe the plan will improve health care, while 34 percent believe quality will fall...
...Fifty-seven percent oppose increasing taxes to pay for the plan...
...If Clinton takes Moscow, he will permanently shift the balance of political power to the party of government...
...These are Republican targets for a coalition win...
...Gingrich argues that there are sixty-five or seventy Democrats who support Jim Cooper's (D-Tenn...
...and tackle the abuses of tort lawyers in medical malpractice...
...Hispanic voters are not cooperating with the plans of Democrats who hoped another "minority" would accept dependency status and join blacks as a non-demanding voting bloc for Democrat candidates...
...Opposition to government spending and taxes, once derided simply as "greed," will now be the cause of sickness and death...
...Clinton's plan is based on the premise that a government monopoly can do things more effectively and more economically than the market and competition...
...Then 14 million workers' livelihoods will be dependent on government decisions...
...Republicans in Congress see encouraging similarities between the health plan and last spring's budget...
...Republicans should present a reform that restrains prices by moving the government out of the health-care field, not further into it...
...Some Republicans, traumatized by the loss of the White House, fail to see the fundamental shakiness of the present Democratic coalition...
...Companies and individuals that were once independent will have to come to grips with Democratic power...
...Senator Phil Gramm (R-Tex...
...If Republican resistance turns into his Stalingrad, a hollow liberalism could lose everything...
...points out that the Clinton plan relies on price controls, government bureaucracies, and the elimination of consumer choice...
...Republicans view the threat to privacy inherent in having all one's health records on a credit card as a political weakness...
...For Gramm, it is not enough to oppose and defeat the Clinton plan...
...The combative Gingrich is now the unchallenged leader °fins party in the House...
...A large enough pilot program will show the strength, popularity, and success of choice and undermine the scare tactics of the left...
...Gramm's bill would also end the discrimination against" theself-employed by making their health insurance costs tax-deductible, as they are for those working for companies...
...Ohio Republican John Boehner, the aggressive young chairman of the Conservative Opportunity Society, is expected to enter one of the leadership races as well...
...Homosexuals are hardly as numerous as the Clintonites had led themselves to believe—when polls last year showed Clinton winning 85 percent of the gay vote, Democratic campaign workers predicted the emergence of a gay bloc that would provide 8.5 percent of the vote in any election, a bloc equal in size to the black vote...
...The actual cost was $106 billion...
...Similarly, voters who saw through Mondale's use of "compassion" will understand that "security"—which James Carville is urging Clinton to repeat like a mantra—is another code word for higher taxes, not to mention empowering a political class that believes Americans cannot run their lives without substantial direction from people who went to Yale Law School...
...They were voting not simply for a conservative but for an aggressive political fighter who has campaigned hard for Republicans of all stripes...
...Gramm's Comprehensive Family Health Access and Savings Act would provide a "medical savings account" option to allow employers and employees to buy a $3,000-deductible catastrophic insurance policy...
...But this was based on a naive belief in the Kinsey claim that homosexuals comprise 10 percent of the population—when the actual number may be closer to 1 percent...
...Medicaid, which cost $1 billion when passed in 1965, now costs $76 billion a year...
...Phil Gramm has set up twenty town hall meetings around the nation to point out the true nature and cost of the Clinton drive for government control over health care...
...Senator Ted Kennedy has already voiced such a claim...
...Chamber of Commerce or Washington trade associations...
...F or several weeks the establishment press' fawned on the First Lady and Republicans in the Senate appeared to be falling all over themselves to apologize for their beastly opposition to Clinton's budget and "stimulus package...
...Clinton, elected with a vote midway between Mike Dukakis's losing 46 percent and Jimmy Carter's losing 41 percent, will lose the presidency in 1996, barring a three-way race or a fundamental change in the political landscape...
...Jerry Solomon of New York, believed to be Michel's favored successor as Republican leader, immediately announced his candidacy...
...Of course, the Democrats' most dwindling asset is the belief—now discredited even in the Soviet Union and Mexico—that government can effectively run large parts of the economy...
...Official Washington was stunned by the speed and size of Gingrich's victory...
...The accommodationist politics of the Michel years is thus nearing an end, and the Republican leadership is set on a conservative and confrontational path for the foreseeable future...
...Individuals would then spend the first $3,000 of health-care costs for themselves and their families and be covered by a catastrophic insurance plan for higher costs...
...Although it went unreported by the Gingrich-demonizing press, Gingrich won the support of moderates and conservatives alike...
...A provision allowing individuals to keep (in an IRA) any money not spent gives a real incentive for cost-containment...
...Gingrich had garnered eighty-eight of those commitments—the required majority—within thirty hours of Michel's announcement, and won support from fully forty of forty-eight freshmen...
...Dick Armey has announced that he will run for re-election as conference chairman and is presently unopposed...
...Meanwhile, the New Deal Democrats who came of age in the 1930s are now aged 72 to 82 and passing away...
...Labor unions continue their decline...
...Hillary Clinton's allies' insistence that any health plan fund abortions flies in the face of the Hyde Amendment, opposing such government funding...
...They will nationalize 14 percent of the economy and politicize health care...
...The next year will determine whether a coalition of what Bob Dole calls "Big Government, Big Unions, and Big Business" can reshape America into a social democracy...
...But by Thursday, Republican whip Newt Gingrich stood outside the Capitol with seventy-five Republican colleagues to announce that he had firm commitments of support from 109 of 176 House Republicans...
...Clinton can also see the campaign for choice in education as the beginning of the privatization of 6 percent of the nation's economy...
...Republican strategist Bill Kristol compares Clinton's grab of 14 percent of the American economy to the German decision to invade Russia in 1941...
...And effecting that change is the goal of this "health-care reform" package...
...But the pleasantries exchanged with Hillary Clinton—in meaningless hearings over a vague 237-page outline of intent—only masked a growing understanding by the Republicans of the stakes of Clinton's challenge...
...managed-competition alternative to Clinton (or even prefer a more market-based approach), and believes that thirty more Democrats in marginal seats are so weakened by their vote for the unpopular Clinton tax increase that they will not be able to vote for socialized medicine next summer before the 1994 election...
...Clinton is starting with a lower base of support than he did last February, and the more citizens understand that Clinton is proposing a government-run health care system, the less they like it: A Washington Post poll of October 7-10 finds that support for the plan has fallen from 56 to 51 percent, while opposition has increased from 24 to 39 percent...
...A nd coalitions are building outside of Congress...
...Even moderate Democrats are reminding Clinton that the government has been off in its estimates of previous entitlement costs...
...Medicare, enacted in 1965, was predicted to cost $9 billion annually by 1990...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
