“You cannot always say no,” Rep. Ted Poe told Fox News March 27 just hours after he resigned from the House Freedom Caucus. Like many of his fellow conservatives, Poe had joined the House Freedom Caucus intent on repealing and replacing Obamacare as part of an overall assault on statism. However, the House Freedom Caucus kicked a game-winning political field goal for socialized medicine by successfully blocking what may be the only opportunity Republicans will have to repeal and replace Obamacare during this Congress…or potentially ever.
“I think it’s time that we lead and continue not to say no on everything that takes place when bills come forward in the House of Representatives….There’s some members of the Freedom Caucus, they’d vote no against the Ten Commandments if it came up for a vote,” Poe said.
The Democrats in Congress did not have the numbers to block President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s repeal-and-replace package known as the American Health Care Act. In order to defeat AHCA, Democrats would need to rely on liberal Republicans and, surprisingly, a large number of very conservative Republicans. The bill could pass if only a small number of Republicans defected.
Trump and Ryan tried to cobble together the votes through extensive negotiations. At the last minute, the vote was delayed from Thursday to Friday. In the end, the majority of the House Freedom Caucus’ thirty-five members publicly pledged to vote against the AHCA in the run-up to an anticipated vote on the House floor.
On Friday, Ryan scrapped the vote. Ryan knew he didn’t have the requisite votes to pass the bill in the House, and wanted to avoid putting a target on the backs of Republican congressmen in the 2018 election cycle by having their votes on the record.
The Freedom Caucus has defended its actions, and its cheerleader and co-ideologue in the upper chamber, Sen. Rand Paul, has been basking in the attention given to these hard-core Tea Partiers for triumphing over what Paul called “ObamaCareLite.”
Pro-white advocates don’t exercise unanimity over health care policy. There are likely some who are glad that the AHCA didn’t prevail for the same reasons the House Freedom Caucus opposed it. Others still have advocated for a completely socialized health care regime. I myself am against the single-payer system, since socialism does not work, and is immoral, no matter the race of the people involved.
However, the main question is: Where’s the wall? And why are they still here? Health care reform was never an end in itself to me, and I imagine it was never an end in itself to many pro-white advocates. It can make things better or much worse, sure. But what about stopping the bleeding of our nation and folk? When will we get to that?
To me, the words of Rep. Poe — that “you cannot always say no” — are significant because the purpose of the Trump Administration is not one policy here or one policy there. Its purpose is the restoration and independence of our people. That is our compelling vision. We must have something to which we say “Yes!” This isn’t 2010 or even 1998. We are not trying to say “no” to a Democratic administration. We are trying to build something good while tearing down something bad. Successful passage of the AHCA would have further demoralized the Left and their lackeys in the “moderate” wing of the GOP. It would have emboldened people on our side, as once again we would have seen that the Trump Train could not be stopped.
Now we face a predicament. It’s not a quagmire, it’s not a dead end, it’s not a stopping point or a period at the end of a sentence. But it is a predicament. How do we regain momentum in the cultural war of liberation we and Trump are waging? How do we get from here to the Great Wall of Trump?
Thankfully, Ryan has indicated that he will not dally any longer with health care reform. Trump has said the same. They are moving on to other items on Trump’s policy agenda. That’s fine. Any new presidential administration has a long list of distinct policy goals to score victories. Some presidents earn better win-loss records in their first 100 days than others. We shouldn’t be surprised or discouraged to see Trump flit from issue to issue. He’s trying to run the table in his own political March Madness bracket.
It is a shame that Obamacare will remain the law of the land for the foreseeable future. People will continue to suffer unnecessarily from this bad policy. AHCA was not a perfect reform package, but it would have delivered a W to Trump’s win-loss column. He and Republicans could have worked together to amend the law to work out its defects, which were many. Some have argued that they’ve done Trump a favor by killing a bad bill. In my opinion, failure to come through with a solution of some sort is a worse political sin than failure to come through with a perfect solution. To fail to get anything done seems like you just didn’t keep your word. Voters will remember (and the Left will incessantly remind them).
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: failure to pass a much-touted health care reform sank the Clinton Administration during its first term and led to a Republican landslide in 1994. If the Republicans and Trump don’t think it can happen to them, they’re foolish. Anything is possible.
But Trump can recover from this L in his win-loss column. The key is to win on the important things that people put him in office to do, retaining their confidence and supercharging them for the 2018 and 2020 elections. (Repealing Obamacare was one of the biggest issues they elected him to fix, by the way, which is why this is a big deal.) Nonetheless, if he racks up more wins and regains his momentum, we can still “build the wall and deport them all” in short order.
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