RNC Women

As of today, fourteen states have joined a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the health care takeover signed into law by President Obama.  This challenge, and the legal actions to come that will be brought by other states, represent the last stand in the defense of states’ rights in the battle over health care. 

Many commentators are busy trying to color these legal actions as mere political theatre.  Unfortunately, President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid made sure the political process failed in this instance.  They used every trick in the book to shove this bill through.  We are taking a stand in the courts because we need to fight against this encroachment on our personal liberties and protect states from exacerbating already bad fiscal problems.

Critics on the left wonder why state governments are in such a rush to get their lawsuits filed.  What they fail to understand is that the costs to the states to implement this bill are enormous.  Many states lack the ... more

While President Obama and the Democrats in Congress spent the past year laying plans to ram a health bill through Congress that would raise taxes on small businesses and put the brakes on our economy, millions of Americans lost their jobs and found themselves in the unemployment line. 

It is shameful that President Obama and his Democrat allies in Congress neglected jobs and the economy during their cynical push to take over this nation’s health care.  Yet there are two more lost jobs to come that all Americans will have reason to celebrate – Harry Reid’s defeat this November and a Republican takeover of the U.S. House that fires Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. 

As the health care debate reached a crescendo this month, the newest jobs numbers were almost completely lost in the din of the Democrats’ push to pass their health bill by any means necessary.  During the last, fevered month of debate on the health bill, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), “the number ... more

During the debate last night in the U.S. House over the federal takeover of health care, lots of talking points about pre-existing conditions were trotted out by Democrats on the House floor.  Nancy Pelosi even claimed during the debate that once the health bill was enacted just being a woman would no “no longer be considered a pre-existing condition.”

What the Democrats didn’t talk about was the new pre-existing conditions that they were voting to impose on American small businesses. 

The bill approved by the U.S. House nearly triples the penalty on small businesses who don't offer health care insurance to their employees from $750 to $2000 per employee and applies these taxes to part-time as well as full-time workers.  The bill also includes an unprecedented extension of the Medicare tax to all non-wage income.  These tax increases will raise the top marginal rate on small business owners and the top tax rate on investment income - discouraging the activity needed to grow the ... more

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee released a startling report yesterday that every American should know about in advance of the Sunday ‘showdown’ vote on health care in the U.S. House. 

The report focuses on the Individual Mandate Tax (IMT) proposed in the Democrats’ health care legislation. Under this provision, Democrats make the IRS the chief enforcer for a new government-run health insurance system.

According to the report:

“Disturbingly, the IRS would be in charge of verifying that every American taxpayer has obtained acceptable health coverage for every month of the year. If the IRS determines that a taxpayer lacks acceptable insurance for even a single month, then the IRS would impose a new tax on that taxpayer, even auditing the taxpayer and could assess interest and penalties on top of the tax. This is an unprecedented new role for the IRS – one that will inject the IRS even further into the lives of American families.”

The report also shows that, if the ... more

Earlier in the health care debate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave Republicans in Congress just hours to read a thousand page, trillion dollar health care bill before voting on it. 

Now, according to news reports yesterday, she is laying plans to skip the trouble of voting on the bill altogether.  By using a procedural trick called ‘deem and pass,’ Nancy Pelosi is setting the stage to pass a massive health care overhaul without ever having a vote on it in the U.S. House. 

Constitutional scholars are understandably wary of the idea.  In a Politico story on Tuesday, George Washington University law professor Alan Morrisson said, “If I were advising somebody," on whether deem and pass would run into constitutional trouble, "I would say to them, ‘Don’t do it.’”

These last, desperate moves by Nancy Pelosi to pass the health care bill by any means necessary illustrate the depth of the public’s disapproval of the proposed Democratic health reforms.  The American people want control of ... more

On the Sunday news shows yesterday, Congressional leaders and aides to President Obama took to the airwaves to declare that they would push their deeply flawed health care proposal into law this week.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is floating plans to bend the rules in an attempt to avoid voting for the Senate Democrats’ government-run health care experiment.  The Democratic leadership is trying to round up a majority of votes in the House, even though it lacks the support of the American people.

These plans to skirt the will of the American public must not be allowed to succeed.  If you believe in the need to protect and preserve your ability to choose your own doctors and make your own health care decisions, please call Nancy Pelosi today and tell her so.  Just dial (202) 224-3121 to reach the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be connected.  The time to speak out is now. 

President Obama kicked this week off with the beginning of a road show to push his health care takeover.  On Monday he traveled to Pennsylvania to sell his health plan, and the White House has another stop scheduled for this afternoon in Saint Louis.

Yet in the very states President Obama is visiting to push health care, it is jobs and the economy that the people are most concerned about.  This public relations blitz is yet another illustration of the tone deafness of the Obama Administration.  While the president takes to the road to push a health care bill that lacks the support of the American people, thousands of folks in the very states he’s visiting find themselves out of work.  The American people want the president and Congress to focus on job creation – not a massive takeover of health care. 

While President Obama visited the Philadelphia area to push health care, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that unemployment grew another 2 percent over the past ... more

Last Friday, upon the release of the latest monthly jobs report, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good." Harry Reid made these comments because he is simply out of touch with the American people and his constituents in Nevada, which doesn’t speak well of Senator Reid’s leadership. 

Senator Reid deserves to be voted out of office if he is so out of touch with his constituents that he truly believes it is good news that 36,000 more Americans have lost their jobs.  Yet even if we give Senator Reid the benefit of the doubt on his speech on Friday, what do his comments show about his previous promises on job creation?  After all, it was Senator Reid, along with President Obama, who promised that last year’s stimulus package would “save or create” millions of jobs.  Is Senator Reid out of touch with his constituents or with reality? 

Harry Reid’s words failed him last Friday.  But it is his leadership that has failed the ... more

The health care bill now being pushed by the White House would fundamentally rewrite a full sixth of the economy of the United States.  It would grant the government unprecedented control over how our health care is paid for, which doctors we are allowed to see and what treatment options we are able to consider. 

A fundamental change to such a significant sector of our economy SHOULD require sixty votes in the United States Senate for passage into law.  Yet today the White House is threatening to use the reconciliation process to force a simple majority vote and silence the Republican voices speaking out against this deeply flawed proposal. 

Incredibly, just a few years ago it was then Senator Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid who spoke out loudly against the reconciliation process.  At the National Press Club on April 26, 2005, then Senator Obama said when talking about reconciliation, “You know, the Founders designed this system, as frustrating it is, to make sure that there's ... more

Exactly eight months from today, the American people will go to the polls.  What we do over those next eight months will decide whether we elect a common-sense, conservative Congress or hand the Democrats another two years to try to give the government more control over our health care, our jobs and our lives. 

If a day is an eternity in politics, you can imagine what can happen in eight months.  Yet, the way forward for our Party is clear.  The lessons we should take to guide us until Election Day are those that we learned in the months since the 2008 election. 

With President Obama’s inauguration, the media and the pundits took great pleasure in declaring the Republican Party a thing of the past.  The president’s approval ratings were high, and Democrats held large majorities in both houses of Congress.  Unfortunately for Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the pundits in Washington, the American people have a funny way of making their voices heard when they feel their liberties and ... more