Yesterday, Senate Democrats voted to kill Sen. Roy Blunt’s (R-MO) amendment that would have restored the rights of religious institutions to not be forced to pay for things like contraception coverage that violate their religious beliefs. Democrats lined up against religious liberty and in favor of a mandate requiring religious employers to pay for insurance coverage than includes contraception issued by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius authorized by President Obama’s unpopular health care law.
The Wall Street Journal editors point out the outrageous lengths Democrats went to try to change the issue from one of protecting religious liberty to a fantasy attack on women’s health. “Nancy Pelosi called it ‘devastating legislation’ and ‘the latest ploy in the Republican agenda of disrespecting the health of American women.’ Planned Parenthood claimed the ‘dangerous proposal’ would have allowed ‘your boss’—yes, yours—to decide ‘which prescriptions you can get filled and which medical procedures you can have,’ including cancer screening, maternity care and AIDS medications. It sounds medieval. But in fact, the provision that the Senate tabled yesterday would merely have restored the status quo ante of one month ago. Those were the dark ages before the Obama Administration overturned traditional conscience protections with its birth-control insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act.”
Democrats’ distortions about the vote have been so egregious, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker awarded “Three Pinocchios” to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) rhetoric on the subject, writing, “Schumer’s comments ooze hyperbole and alarmist language. Beyond that, he has to rely on legalistic interpretations to defend them. As for the senator’s slippery slope argument, we find that accepting such reasoning is a bit of a slippery slope itself. It’s a favorite of politicians who want to draw loose connections rather than debate the merits of a proposal as it stands. Overall, Schumer earns three Pinocchios for his comments about the Blunt Amendment.”
The WSJ editors explain, “The amendment had nothing to do with a ‘ban’ on contraception, or any of the other delusions and distortions of the left. The real issue is that the ObamaCare mandate requires employers, including religious schools and hospitals, to buy coverage that may violate their moral beliefs. The Blunt amendment would merely have let those religious-affiliated institutions provide coverage without paying for care that violates their religious conscience.”
As The Wall Street Journal editors write, “[O]ne thing this fracas did prove is that Americans do not like health-care mandates—which is why liberals stole the language of anti-coercion to defend their coercion. . . . The real offense against freedom and women is the mandate. The fact that Democrats don’t dare to accurately describe their own positions, or the regulations that they want to foist on everyone else, shows how extreme those positions and regulations really are.”
“…Obama suggested that the main problem with high gasoline prices is their rapid rise, not their total of about $4 a gallon. ‘I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment,’ Obama said.” (“One Down, More To Go For Republicans Aiding McCain,” The Associated Press, 6/12/08)
CNBC’S John Harwood:“So could these high prices help us?”SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” (CNBC’s “Special Report,” 6/10/08)
Eugene Dokes, Navy veteran and small business owner files candidacy for district 70
Republican Eugene Dokes officially filed today as a candidate for the newly redrawn House of Representatives District 70. The district spans from Hazelwood to St. Charles City and includes portions of Bridgeton, Maryland Heights, Creve Coeur, Earth City, Harvester and Cottleville. Dokes is currently Chair of the St. Charles Republican Central Committee.
“I have been fortunate to have been a citizen of both St. Louis County and St. Charles County. I believe I have a comprehensive understanding of how state law can impact my entire district. Likewise, I know that I can bring a unique and energetic element to the State Legislature. I eagerly anticipate the day I am able to serve the constituents of this newly drawn district.
Dokes is a 29 year old “Operation Enduring Freedom” Navy Veteran and current Real Estate Broker and Investor. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration with minors in Psychology, Sociology, and Management from Columbia College. He also holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Lindenwood University and is expected to complete his PhD requirements in Organization Management (Business) from Capella University within 6 months. He has also recently been admitted to a PhD program in Public Policy at UMSL. He also serves on the Missouri Advisory Board for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Eugene and his wife Kenyota have been happily married for 9 years and have 3 small children.
Clay shouldn’t be so confident, especially after the hit piece the Post Dispatch put out on him on Sunday.
Clay said he wasn’t worried about facing a fellow Democratic incumbent. He said the new First District includes only 20 percent of Russ Carnahan’s old district. “He doesn’t have a chance,” Clay said. “Eighty percent of the district is the district I’ve represented for 12 years. I’m very confident. I look forward to presenting my record as a strong committed progressive.”
Clay noted that a recent National Journal ranking put him as tied for the most liberal member of Congress, compared to 139th for Carnahan. “The record speaks for itself,” Clay said. Read more…
In the age of ballooning budget deficits and unhappiness with government healthcare, you have to at least give Clay credit for being proud of being the ‘most liberal member of Congress!’
The nanny staters are at it again! This time they want to protect us from the payday loan industry by placing an initiative on the ballot in November to cap interest on these short term loans. Look, we all want to pay the lowest interest we can on our loans, but it’s a fact of life and economics that if you’re considered a high risk, you’ll pay a rate that is commensurate with that perceived risk. The proponents of the ballot initiative will tell you that this is a question of race and taking advantage of people in a less than ideal economic situation. It’s not of course but we can expect this issue to be demagogued to death.
We have one question for these nanny staters? Where will payday loan clients go when these businesses are forced out of business? Down to the local Bank of America, US Bank, or Commerce Bank? We all know that these institutions won’t make very short term, low dollar amount loans to these people. Where will they go? The Missouri Record has an idea:
It is worth seriously considering the implications of a black market. Surely, consumers who need short-term emergency finance in the status quo are often desperate, and will seek out desperate solutions. Where legal means of satisfying their desires fail, they will turn to a black market. We know this from our prior experiments with Prohibitionist policies, particularly alcohol prohibition.
What will the effect of this black market be? We don’t know, but it might be a fair guess that mafia loan sharks might emerge, tempted by the lure of black market profit margins. Worse, desperate consumers will decide that the law does not meet their needs and make the conscious decision to disregard the law, seeking out providers of black market financing. Certainly, all the problems that consumers face in the status quo payday lenders can only be worse in a black market, and injured parties may be more unwilling to seek redress through legal processes. Read more…
With gas prices spiking again, it’s amazing to watch the lengths to which Democrats will still go to prevent domestic energy production which could help lower prices, promote energy independence, and create jobs.
Just yesterday WKBW in Buffalo, NY, reported, “U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer Sunday called on the U.S. State Department to press the government of Saudi Arabia to publicly and unequivocally promise to increase its oil production . . . .” Schumer, the New York Democrat who spearheads messaging for the Senate majority, said, “These skyrocketing fuel prices are directly linked to the global energy market . . . . To address this situation, I urge the State Department to work with government of Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production . . . .” Schumer even pointed out that “lower production levels have a negative impact on global markets.”
And yet Democrats have blocked or delayed development of oil and gas production in the United States for years. Recall back in 2008 when gas prices spiked and Republicans were trying to pass a bill to expand responsible offshore drilling. Senate Democrats continually objected, including then-Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO), now Secretary of the Interior in the Obama administration. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell tried to get the bill passed, even asking if Democrats would agree to pass the bill only if gas prices reached $5 a gallon. Still, Salazar objected, calling the energy production the bill would have allowed, “a phantom solution.”
And now, Sen. Schumer is asking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to get Saudi Arabia to increase oil production instead of asking President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline which would increase oil supplies in the United States and allow the country to get more oil from our friends in Canada. Why aren’t Democrats asking for the shovel-ready American energy jobs the Keystone XL pipeline would create?
In a must-read editorial today, The Wall Street Journal notes that Transcanada, the company trying to build Keystone XL, has decided it can’t wait on Democrats and the Obama White House any longer and will begin building a portion of the pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas. Amazingly, President Obama, weeks after rejecting Transcanada’s permit to build the full pipeline, is now embracing this partial construction.
The WSJ editors write, “President Obama claims that voters aren’t stupid about gas prices, but then they’d have to be to understand his energy policy. Try to parse the latest turn—make that backward triple somersault with two twists—in the Keystone XL pipeline saga. Yesterday TransCanada announced that it plans to break up the $7.6 billion project into several stand-alone parts, beginning immediately with a leg connecting Cushing, Oklahoma with the Gulf Coast. The original plan was to connect U.S. refiners with Alberta’s oil sands crude and other Canadian and U.S. energy resources, but to mollify the environmental lobby Mr. Obama’s State Department refused to issue the cross-border permits last month.
Now, apparently, it’s time to mollify the Administration’s union supporters that favored the thousands of jobs that the shovel-ready Keystone would have thrown off—not to mention the many not-so-stupid voters who’ve noticed Mr. Obama’s antijobs politics. The White House immediately put out a statement claiming that ‘The President welcomes today’s news’ and even that ‘we support the company’s interest in proceeding with this project.’ In other words, Mr. Obama is simultaneously opposing and supporting the Keystone XL. The only problem is that he hasn’t had a change of heart on the important part. The new side-project will help alleviate some of the bottlenecks around Cushing, but it doesn’t do anything to get oil from Canada to the U.S., which is the main point of the pipeline.”
As we approach the 2-year anniversary of President Obama’s unaffordable health care spending law in the coming month, new polling shows the law remains unpopular with Americans as reports continue that the law is failing to control costs.
USA Today writes, “The health care overhaul that President Obama intended to be the signature achievement of his first term instead has become a significant problem in his bid for a second one, uniting Republicans in opposition and eroding his standing among independents. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of the nation’s dozen top battleground states, a clear majority of registered voters call the bill’s passage ‘a bad thing’ and support its repeal if a Republican wins the White House in November. Two years after he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act— and as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments about its constitutionality next month — the president has failed to convince most Americans that it was the right thing to do.”
According to the USA Today/Gallup Poll, 53% of voters in swing states say it was a “bad thing” that the Democrat-controlled Congress passed the law. Nationwide, 50% say the same. Seventy-two percent of swing state voters say the law has had no effect on their family, and 69% say the same thing nationwide. More voters say the law has hurt them than say it has helped. A plurality of voters nationwide and in swing states say they think Obama’s health care law will make things worse for their families. In swing states, 53% of voters say they would support repealing the law.
Recall what Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in late 2009 as Senate Democrats were jamming their health care bill through the Senate and cutting off amendments: “When people see what is in this bill and when people see what it does, they will come around.”
With the Supreme Court set to hear arguments in March on the constitutionality of the Democrat health care law’s mandate that every person buy health insurance, the USA Today/Gallup Poll finds huge majorities of voters consider that mandate unconstitutional. Nationwide, 75% consider it unconstitutional, and 76% in swing states agree.
In its own analysis of national numbers, Gallup writes, “Americans overwhelmingly believe the ‘individual mandate,’ as it is often called, is unconstitutional, by a margin of 72% to 20%. Even a majority of Democrats, and a majority of those who think the healthcare law is a good thing, believe that provision is unconstitutional.”
Meanwhile, the law is still falling short of the predictions and promises Democrats made when it passed. The Washington Post reported last week, “Medical costs for enrollees in the health-care law’s high-risk insurance pools are expected to more than double initial predictions, the Obama administration said Thursday in a report on the new program. . . . Those who have enrolled in the program are projected to have significantly higher medical costs than the government initially expected. . . . The costs also are significantly higher than those of similar high-risk pools that many states have operated for decades.”
Related:
Now, call us cynical, but the timing of the Post Dispatch’s random act of journalism yesterday has us scratching our heads. Way back in 2009, a Missouri blogger and the Washington Times did pieces on Cong. Clay and his friends in the rent to own industry. Post Dispatch writers were as quiet as church mice – until yesterday. We find it curious that with all the talk lately of a potential match up between Cong. Clay and the redistricted Cong. Carnahan, why did they decide now to do an obvious hit piece? Has the Post showed their hand on how they would endorse in a primary?
Never thought we’d hear a stalwart Democrat like St. Louis City treasurer candidate Brian Wahby describing as “excellent” Koster’s attempt to help repeal Obamacare! Does Mr. Wahby also believe Mr. Koster’s past support for voter ID is “excellent” too?
Reacting to President Obama’s speech on energy yesterday, The Wall Street Journal editorializes, “‘The American people aren’t stupid,’ thundered President Obama yesterday in Miami, ridiculing Republicans who are blaming him for rising gasoline prices. Let’s hope he’s right, because not even Forrest Gump could believe the logic of what Mr. Obama is trying to sell. To wit, that a) gasoline prices are beyond his control, but b) to the extent oil and gas production is rising in America, his energy policies deserve all the credit, and c) higher prices are one more reason to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers while handing even more subsidies to his friends in green energy. Where to begin?”
The WSJ editors look at domestic energy production and write, “Mr. Obama rightly points to the rising share of U.S. oil consumption now produced at home. But this trend began in the late Bush Administration, which opened up large new areas on and offshore for oil and gas drilling that are now coming on stream. Mr. Obama sneered at expanded drilling as a candidate in 2008 and for most of his term has done little to expand it. In early 2010, he proposed to open some new areas to drilling but shut that down after the Gulf oil spill.”
They add, “Oh, and don’t forget the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have increased the delivery of oil from Canada and North Dakota’s Bakken Shale to Gulf Coast refineries, replacing oil from Venezuela.” Though President Obama has been promoting what he calls an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, his rejection of the Keystone XL stands out in stark contrast to his stated goals. Even Democrats and unions criticized his decision, with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) saying the it was “a major setback for the American economy, American workers and America’s energy independence.” And today, The Hill reports, “New polling data shows strong support for approving the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline that the Obama administration rejected in January, a decision that unleashed a torrent of GOP attacks against President Obama. The Pew Research Center poll released Thursday finds 66 percent who have heard about the issue say the proposed pipeline to bring oil sands from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries should be approved, while 23 percent say it shouldn’t.”
Meanwhile, The Journal editorial points out, “Mr. Obama yesterday also repeated his proposal that now is the time to raise taxes on oil and gas companies, as if doing so will make them more likely to drill. He must not believe the economic truism that when you tax something you get less of it, including fewer of the new jobs they’ve created.” It’s worth noting that the last time Democrats in Congress floated the idea of raising taxes on energy companies, several Senate Democrats blasted the idea, and it was voted down with bipartisan opposition. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) called the proposal “laughable” and said, “Will it create jobs? No. It will actually hurt job production in the United States.”
The WSJ editors conclude, “We’d almost feel sorry for Mr. Obama’s gas-price predicament if it weren’t a case of rough justice. The President has deliberately sought to raise the price of energy throughout the economy via his cap-and-trade agenda. He is now getting his wish, albeit a little too overtly for political comfort.” It’s certainly instructive to recall what both Obama and his future Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said about gas prices in 2008. The AP wrote at the time, “Obama suggested that the main problem with high gasoline prices is their rapid rise, not their total of about $4 a gallon. ‘I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment,’ Obama said.” And Chu said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said last summer in a speech slamming President Obama’s energy policies, “The President says he’s a proponent of domestic energy production, but let’s be honest: he hasn’t shown it. And this shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is an administration, after all, that appointed an Energy Secretary who said a month after the President’s election that, ‘somehow we need to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.’ Since then, the administration’s policies have helped get us there. Not only have gas prices skyrocketed, but the administration’s policies are also hindering the creation of thousands of good, private-sector jobs that so many Americans desperately need.”
