Republicans in Congress push anti-Obama agenda

With the presidential election this year as the political driving force, the Republican majority in Congress has wasted no time in revealing what 2016 will yield legislatively.

To no one’s surprise, the agenda has a definite anti-Barack Obama twist, with the president’s signature health-care law topping the list. Republican leaders don’t seem to care that last year the American people voiced their displeasure over the dozens of votes taken by the House and Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). None of the measures made it to President Obama’s desk, and even if one had, a veto was a certainty.

But the GOP is undaunted, believing that the ACA repeal is a winning issue for the party in this year’s presidential and congressional elections.

The House, led by the new speaker, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, reconvened this week and the first order of business was the Obamacare legislation. The measure also contained cuts to funding for Planned Parenthood.

The Senate passed the bill in December under rules protecting it from Democratic obstruction. The House passed the bill Wednesday and sent it to the president’s desk. With a presidential veto a certainty, Republicans have scheduled a vote on Jan. 22 to override it. The date coincides with the annual march in Washington by anti-abortion activists.

“Obamacare is a failure, and taxpayer funding of abortion providers is wrong,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. “Congress is making its choice clear.”

McCarthy’s spin on this legislative sleight-of-hand won’t work because most of the candidates for the GOP nomination for president already have adopted the death of Obamacare and cuts to Planned Parenthood funding as two of the issues they believe will set their party apart from the Democrats in the general election.

Key accomplishment

But, as we’ve argued during the previous repeal efforts in Congress, it’s not enough for Republicans to simply vote to strike down President Obama’s chief accomplishment of his two-term tenure. The former senator from Illinois will leave office in mid-January 2017.

For millions of Americans who have never had health-care coverage or have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance, the Affordable Care Act has been a godsend.

Thus, this question to the Republicans: What will happen to the beneficiaries of the ACA if you succeed in deep-sixing it?

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, laid out the party’s response to the GOP attack on Obamacare with this comment:

“They have no plan. Republicans just want to undo what Democrats have fought for for decades.” The former first lady and U.S. senator from New York warned that if a Republican succeeds Obama in the White House next year, the health law “will be repealed and then you will have to start all over again.”

But the Republican primary voters aren’t demanding a replacement for the ACA. All they want is to kill it, so as to deprive the president of a key aspect of his political legacy.

It’s that type of partisanship that has caused Congress to become so dysfunctional.

But it isn’t just health care that Republicans intend to target in this session of Congress. On Tuesday, after President Obama issued 10 executive orders to tighten controls on guns to curb the unregulated buying and selling of weapons over the Internet and at gun shows, the GOP came out swinging. The candidates for president charged that the president’s action was an attack on the Second Amendment and was unconstitutional, while members of Congress promised legislative action to block the implementation. One approach is to deny funding that Obama will request to hire 200 or so Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents.

The president argued that the recent mass murders of innocent children and adults by individuals who should not have possessed guns demands action by the federal government.

But Republicans aren’t buying that argument and insist there are more than enough laws on the book.