Are Republicans genuinely interested in governing? Are they genuinely interested in solving society’s problems?<\/p>\n
I have to wonder.<\/p>\n
The Republicans have been saying, all along, that they’ve been frozen out of the health care reform process. That the Democrats are ignoring their ideas.<\/p>\n
And yet, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post<\/i> points out that the things the Republican Party wants are already in<\/i> the Senate bill<\/a>.<\/p>\n President Obama himself has said that the bill pending is Congress is<\/i> a Republican bill. It’s what Bob Dole and Bill Frist have proposed in the past. The Senate bill is actually to the right<\/i> of the Healthy Americans Act, which was introduced by a Republican Senator from Utah.<\/p>\n So, I ask. Are the Republicans interested in solving society’s problems? Or do they just want to score political points?<\/p>\n Ezra Klein’s answer? “John Boehner and Mitch McConnell responded to Barack Obama’s summit invitation by demanding Obama scrap the health-care reform bill entirely. This is the context for that demand. What they want isn’t a bill that incorporates their ideas. They’ve already got that. What they want is no bill at all.”<\/p>\n In other words, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt has become the party of nihilism.<\/p>\n Or the party of poo-flinging monkeys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Are Republicans genuinely interested in governing? Are they genuinely interested in solving society’s problems? I have to wonder. The Republicans have been saying, all along, that they’ve been frozen out of the health care reform process. That the Democrats are ignoring their ideas. And yet, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post points out that theContinue reading “On Health Care Reform and the Republican Party”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[613,4108,120],"class_list":["post-2682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-health-care","tag-politics","tag-republican-party","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}