Good news GOP: Bruised egos now covered!
Here is the real beauty of the current Republican Party, which has no plan for America other than defeating this President in November, no matter what the cost:
Their only plan on health care was to not “spike the ball” if the Supreme Court knocked down President Obama’s health care law Thursday. Thirty million people were expected to lose health care if it happened, and all the Republicans worried about was not celebrating too much.
And when it was over Thursday and the President’s opponents had lost, here is what John Boehner, a lousy Speaker of the House and worse loser, said:
“The President’s health care law is hurting our economy.” Why? Because Boehner wants you to believe everything Obama does, including rooting for the White Sox, hurts the economy.
But don’t listen to all those like Boehner. It is much better to listen to Valerie Peterson, home-care worker, Far Rockaway, Queens, who said this Thursday when she found out about the Supreme Court’s decision:
“It is a beautiful day.”
Then Valerie Peterson of Far Rockaway said, “I’m asthmatic, and I suffer from hypertension, and despite the fact that I am employed, I went without health insurance for 18 months. I make sure that my patients receive the care they need, but my company viewed my health as a secondary concern because I couldn’t get enough hours to qualify for employersponsored health insurance.”
She said, “This ruling helps ensure that people like me who are living with preexisting conditions are able to receive the care we need. It’s time for people like Mitt Romney to stop playing politics with the health, well-being and livelihood of hard-working Americans.” Is Obama’s plan perfect? Nobody ever said it was. What law or plan for sweeping social change has ever been perfect? Fifty years ago the great and holy saint of the current Republicans, Ronald Reagan, actually cut an LP criticizing Social Security, warning “subsidized medicine would cur- tail Americans’ freedom.”
No wonder even the mention of Reagan’s name these days makes a guy like Boehner, a crier to begin with, actually weep.
For weeks the Republicans looked at the coming Supreme Court decision as some sort of imminent national holiday, and a way to get Obama good, on the great stage of the Supreme Court. The biggest phony on all this, of course, is Romney himself, who nearly wrestles himself to the ground every time he has to explain why his own health-care plan in Massachusetts is somehow different from Obamacare, when even a high school Civics class knows the model’s the same.
Understand: In this decision Justice Roberts writes that this is not some political endorsement of the President’s law, just states it is not the Supreme Court’s job to overturn the laws enacted by the people who have actually been elected to pass them.
“It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices,” he wrote.
Understand something else: Many provisions of a law passed in 2010 are already in place. Hopefully, this law will do what it was always intended to do, despite the demonization of it by those for whom Obama is the Great Satan: Overhaul the insurance industry and let people with preexisting conditions — people already sick — buy insurance at the same rate as those who aren’t already ill.
Only those blind and stupid with hatred for Obama don’t see that. Or simply don’t want to see that his own vision for health care shows not only humanity, but real courage.
John Roberts does a courageous thing on health care himself. Maybe the shocking part about that is that we are shocked now when something like it still happens with any big issue of American politics.
Still: This was a day when it wasn’t against the law in America for the government to help those who need help. In the end Weeping Boehner and those who think in the small-minded way he does didn’t have to worry about spiking the ball. They got spiked. Good.