by Dick Morris
No healthy man ever visited more doctors than my father did before his death, in 2010, at ninety-nine years, nine months, and ten days. He would visit the dentist, the eye doctor, his GI doctor, his GP, his hearing doctor, his heart specialist regularly, and other doctors occasionally. It was, as he aged, his principal reason to leave his home. And why not? Medicare picked up the tab. But give him a flat payment to cover his costs so that he had to weigh whether or not to spend the money on each visit, and his cost of Medicare would have dropped substantially.
HOW TO DEFEAT OBAMA’S TAX-AND-SPEND BUDGETS
Obama will open the budget battle by saying he is moving to the center. He has convened a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, co-chaired by the superannuated former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson and Clinton’s former chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Bowles is an ardent advocate of deficit reduction, but never shies away from using tax increases to try to do it.
The Bowles-Simpson Commission recommended a 2:1 ratio between spending cuts and tax increases, just as previous commissions have done. But history is clear. As noted, the tax increases take effect on schedule, but the cuts somehow never materialize. Even if the reductions in discretionary spending are voted by Congress, the tax hikes slow the economy and, as noted, this drives up entitlement spending, which eats up the planned reduction in discretionary outlays.
Any “compromise” that includes spending cuts and tax increases is really just a tax increase. Period.
To avert the spiral of tax hikes—slowed economic growth—and higher entitlement spending, we need to stop Obama from raising taxes. They would put us on a downward path to economic stagnation. We must say no.
Hell no!
But we need to be clear on our objectives. As noted earlier, we propose a nine-part program for which we must fight throughout the year. Whenever Obama needs a specific piece of legislation—a new budget, spending appropriations bills, or an increase in the debt limit, Republicans must be there with their agenda demanding concessions as we tick off the nine items:
Stopping tax increases
Rolling back government spending
Bringing the deficit down to 3% of the economy
Defunding ObamaCare
Blocking the EPA from imposing a carbon tax
Stopping the NLRB from killing the secret ballot
Freeing small banks to make loans again
Blocking the FCC from undermining free speech
Eliminating earmarks from the budget
The FY2011–12 budget debate will really begin in the spring of 2011 when the federal government’s huge deficits catch up with it and it needs to raise its statutory debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a fiction voted by Congress and regularly and routinely raised whenever the debt rises up that high. Congress always just rubber-stamps the debt increase the president wants.
Not this year!
The newly elected Republican senator from Illinois Mark Kirk has proposed that the GOP resist raising the debt limit unless we wring specific spending reductions and other concessions from Obama. And then we need to keep coming back for more. Senator Kirk proposes that we raise the debt limit for only three months at a time. When the federal government needs more money they will have to come back to Congress asking for an increase in the debt limit. And each time they do we need to be there with our list of demands in hand asking for additional concessions.
Then the debate over the actual budget for FY2012 will begin in the spring and summer of 2011. Republicans, who will control the House of Representatives, will have the constitutional responsibility to initiate spending bills. They will have the primary task of making the spending cuts necessary to cut the deficit. Their work will position the Republican Party for the battle ahead.
They must provide a credible deficit reduction and a path to further cuts without opening the can of worms of Social Security and Medicare.
The Democrats will howl about the severity of the spending cuts and will portray Republicans as heartless.
In 1995–96, these pleas fell on deaf ears and did not move the American people to oppose the cuts until two developments changed the equation: (a) Clinton took dead aim at the Medicare cuts; and (b) Clinton proposed a path to a balanced budget that did not cut Medicare or raise taxes.
Obama won’t have the option of attacking Republicans for proposing Medicare cuts if the Republicans don’t propose any, and he sure won’t articulate a path to a balanced budget that doesn’t involve tax increases.
But if Republicans stay away from Social Security and Medicare, these attacks won’t diminish popular support for their program. A Rasmussen Reports Poll taken in November 2010 showed that by 52–25%, voters believe that “decreases in government spending will help the economy.” On the other hand, by 18–58%, they feel that tax increases “will hurt the economy.”41
With the support of the American people, the Republicans will carry the day.
Some worry that the Republicans need to propose a way to bring the budget into actual balance. A zero deficit is attractive, but, ultimately, the only way to achieve it is to stimulate economic growth as we did in the 1990s. If we can cut the deficit appreciably, bringing it into “primary balance” (i.e., 3% of GDP) without new taxes, the Republican Party will have taken the first step. Then, after the election of 2012, we need to take the next step by adopting tax cuts and reforms in Social Security and Medicare. But let’s get step one done this year!
It won’t be easy.
Obama will doubtless veto any increase in the debt ceiling that contains budget cuts and he will also veto any Republican budget that cuts his big-government programs. The GOP will lack the votes to override. A game of chicken will begin. The government will have no ability to borrow money and no budget. The Republicans will agree to an interim budget or debt limit increase that includes their spending cuts, as they did in 1995, but Obama will veto it, as Clinton did. The government may shut down, as happened in the 1990s. Or the Congress may pass temporary resolutions to keep it open without giving in on its budget proposal.
Armageddon will ensue—a public war between the legislative and the executive. At stake will be the central issue of whether to cut spending or raise taxes.
The Republicans need to hold firm and fast to their guns and not retreat a step. They need to use all the tools of modern communication to convince people that they are right and that Obama is wrong.
If the deadlock persists until well into 2012, so be it. If the question of spending cuts versus tax increases becomes the central issue in the presidential race, so much the better. Republicans can fight on that issue and win!
When Dick was orchestrating Clinton’s side of the government shutdown in 1995–96, he got the Democratic National Committee to purchase about $1.5 million in ads every week to back up the president’s position. The Republicans did not follow suit (or apparently even realize that Clinton was advertising). In 2011–12, Republicans and their allies, such as Americans for Prosperity, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, League of American Voters, Superpac USA, and 60 Plus, need to plaster the airwaves with their message.
But the real battle will not be on television. It will be in the streets. Here, the Tea Party movement will prove our salvation.
These dedicated activists—some old, some young—thronged to rallies across America to protest Obama’s health care changes and to battle for the GOP victories of 2010. Now they must rise up again and dominate the landscape of American politics.
In Greece, London, and Paris, demonstrators ask that government do more for them. In the United States, the Tea Party’s central demand is that it do less.
Many have criticized the Tea Party for challenging Republican establishment candidates in the primaries of 2010. In Nevada, Alaska, South Carolina, New York, Kentucky, Delaware, Utah, and other states, Tea Party leaders vanquished the regular Republican candidates in primaries. Unfortunately, in three cases—the Senate races in Delaware, Colorado, an
d Nevada—they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The Tea Party–backed Senate candidates went down to defeat in November where the establishment candidates would likely have won. (Even had they all won, Republicans would still have fallen short of a Senate majority.)
But the tradeoff will have been worthwhile if the primary defeats strike fear into the hearts of Republican politicians from coast to coast and induce them to hold the line against taxes and for cuts in spending.
If Mike Castle, an eighteen-year Republican congressman at large from Delaware, could lose a Republican primary after serving as a popular lieutenant governor and governor, any Republican is vulnerable anywhere. The shock waves from Christine O’Donnell’s upset primary victory are still reverberating in the souls of GOP pols. She was, in a way, to Republicans the same kind of warning signal that the victory of GOP candidate Scott Brown in Massachusetts was for the Senate Democrats in early 2010. Democrats ran right through the warning and voted for ObamaCare anyway. But they paid the price in November 2010. Republicans must heed the warning and stand strong for spending cuts and no tax hikes.
It is up to the Tea Party to police the ranks of Republicans to hold them in line behind a no-tax position. Those who might go squishy need to see a hail of protests in their home states and face the prospect of primary fights down the road if they stray. Those whom the Tea Party elected, the Tea Party can defeat, and the GOP establishment knows it full well.
The cacophony in the streets must be deafening to sustain Republicans in their no-tax position.
The pressures on the other side will be enormous. Investors will condemn the Republican position as irresponsible. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will warn of dire consequences if tax increases do not pass or the debt limit is not raised. The Federal Reserve Board will go all-out to sell the tax hikes and debt limit hike and to convince Americans that the GOP is demagoguing the issue. China and Japan will weigh in and raise doubts about buying more American bonds. The whole world will join in, demanding higher taxes on the American people.
Except, the American people will hold firm. They will stand up to the pressure from the establishment media because they know full well that our system of free enterprise is more important to them than it is to the established elites, particularly those that come from communist nations like China or the socialist countries in Europe or government-dominated economies like Japan’s. They will stand up for American independence and against tax increases and will win the day.
And, just as the elections of 1996 were structured by Clinton’s victory in the government shutdown of 1995, so the results of the 2012 election will be dominated by the outcome of the budget fights of 2011–12.
Americans will hold fast to no new taxes because they will realize that their country is on the line.
THREATS TO REPUBLICAN UNITY—KEEP AN EYE ON ’EM
But there are other issues that will be wrapped into the great budget and debt limit debates, particularly the need to defund the ObamaCare program. The Republican budget must zero-fund the key provisions of this law, and Obama will undoubtedly stand stubbornly against defunding. As the overall debate swirls about taxes versus spending, a debate within the debate will heat up about the future of ObamaCare.
DEFUNDING OBAMACARE
The threat of new taxes and the looming federal budget deficit are raising our fears of a continued economic recession. But entire sectors of our economy are being paralyzed by the looming threat of federal regulation. No industry is more affected than the health care sector, a full 16% of our economy. Who can expand? Who can hire new people? Who can grow with federal regulations just around the corner?
Arrogantly, the Democratic Congress passed Obama’s health care legislation, even as polls showed that the vast majority of Americans opposed it.
Never has such a major piece of legislation been passed by a simple party-line vote without any crossovers to help it pass. On Election Day 2010, Americans loudly registered their opposition to the health care law changes. As the New York Post wrote: “Democrats who supported the health care bill lost in droves. Eight Democrats in the House…switched from opposing the bill on early votes to supporting it for final passage. Six sought reelection; five…lost. Arizona and Oklahoma passed ballot measures opposing the law’s individual mandate [to buy insurance]…Missouri voters had already done so earlier this year…A Rasmussen telephone poll found 59% of voters in favor of repeal.”42
Now, in the wake of the Republican victory in the House, the question is: how do patriots mitigate the damage to our medical system?
Obviously, repeal is impossible. Even if the Republicans were able to muster enough votes in the Senate to pass a repeal bill, Obama would veto the bill and we would lack the votes to override it.
The best option is to defund the bill; to strip it of its enforcement provisions and make it impotent. Then, if Republicans succeed it dethroning Obama in 2012, they can pass a repeal bill and be rid of the nightmare entirely.
ObamaCare would bring huge changes to our health care system:43
By enrolling tens of millions of people in private health insurance plans, whether they like it or not.
By forcing millions of families to pay absurdly high percentages of their income for health insurance before any federal subsidy kicks in.
By vastly expanding Medicaid, covering 16 million new people.
By establishing standards for private insurance, requiring what must be covered and enforcing compliance.
To promote health care rationing (proponents call it efficiency), it will mandate cost comparative metrics and limit the options a doctor has to provide care.
By creating a new commission to cut Medicare by $500 billion.
Through field experiments and demonstration programs on what it calls controlling spending, but that we know is rationing of health care.
Meanwhile, the bill does not appropriate enough money to do any of these things. It only authorizes the spending. Federal bureaucrats use authorization bills to wrap up fish! It is the appropriations that count! And these require approval of the newly elected Republican House of Representatives.
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the legislation contains 64 specific authorizations to spend up to $105.6 billion and 51 general authorizations to spend “such sums as are necessary”44 between 2010 and 2019.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that there is “at least $50 billion in specified and estimated authorizations of discretionary spending that might be involved in implementing [ObamaCare] legislation.”45
The only actual appropriation in the bill was for $1 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to implement the bill, only between one-fifth and one-tenth of the amount the Congressional Budget Office says will be needed.46
And it doesn’t appropriate a dime for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make sure everybody signs up for health insurance. It authorizes grants to the states to help create the “health insurance exchanges” from which people will buy policies, but doesn’t actually appropriate anything. It also fails to appropriate, or even authorize, funding for the administrative costs states will incur in expanding their Medicaid programs.
As the New England Journal of Medicine noted, “without large additional appropriations, implementation [of ObamaCare] will be crippled.”47
And that is precisely our intention! The New England Journal spells out how defunding might work:
If [ObamaCare] opponents gain a majority in either house of Congress, they could not only withhold needed appropriations but also bar the use of whatever funds are appropriated for…implementation, including the implementation of the provisions requiring individual people to buy insurance or businesses to offer it. They could bar the use of staff time for designing rules for implementation or for paying subsidies to support the purchase of insurance. They could even bar HHS from writing or issuing regulations or engaging in any other federal activity related to the cr
eation of health insurance exchanges.48
The New York Times notes that “the number and variety of restrictions Congress can impose in spending bills is almost unlimited.” The newspaper cites the example of a rider attached to an energy bill in 2009, which provided that “no funds appropriated in this act may be used for the transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance in any school,”49 hardly a germane amendment, but binding anyway. “House Republicans could easily pass similar provisos stating that no federal money could be used to carry out specific sections of the new health care law,” the Times noted.50
And that is just what the House Republican leadership must do. “They’ll get not one dime from us,” incoming Republican House Speaker John A. Boehner said recently. “Not a dime. There is no fixing this [program].”51
The incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) underscores the Republican plans: “If all of ObamaCare cannot be immediately repealed, then it is my intention to begin repealing it piece by piece, blocking funding for its implementation and blocking the issuance of the regulations necessary to implement it.”52
As attractive as the Boehner-Cantor position is to those of us who oppose this legislation, it may be wiser to concentrate on defunding key provisions that are highly unpopular. Such a strategy will force Obama to fight on unfriendly turf.
Here’s how divided government works: if a president proposes a program to Congress, his opponents there usually concentrate on the aspects of the proposal they—and the public—dislike the most. That way, the whole debate focuses on that one part of the overall proposal.
For example, in 1994, President Clinton proposed an omnibus anti-crime package to the Republican Congress. It had three major provisions:
One, which was very popular, stiffened penalties for crimes, authorized funding for more prisons, limited plea bargaining, and established a federal death penalty. Both Republicans and Democrats supported it and it passed without controversy. It was hardly ever mentioned in the national debate (so the voters forgot it was ever passed).
