With just a few days to go until Republicans in the House hold their 40th vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Democrats hit back with a new web ad released late Monday, renaming the Grand Old Party “the Repealicans.”
The video calls out a number of House Republicans for their obsession with repealing all, or part, of the president’s health reform law, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, and Steve King. House Speaker John Boehner gets ribbed for claiming that the House should be judged not on the number of laws it passes, but on how many it repeals.
Republicans have planned a repeal vote for this week called the “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act of 2013.” The bill, sponsored by Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, claims that the IRS cannot be trusted to enact any part of the president’s health care law because it showed bad faith when it targeted groups for audits.
“On top of the negative economic and health consequences of ObamaCare, the law requires an unholy union between the IRS and your protected health information,” Cantor said in the latest Weekly Republican Address. “Recently all of us have been finding out more about the IRS, its activities, and its databases. The doctor’s office is the last place anyone would want to find the IRS.”
Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate have been embroiled in an internal war over whether or not defunding Obamacare is worth shutting down the government, or perhaps more importantly, accepting the blame for shutting down the government. The debate has pitted the likes of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Mike Lee of Utah against Oklahoma’s Senator Tom Coburn and Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina (as msnbc’s Geoff Cowley has summed up.)
Republicans and their cohorts have also launched a “Refuse to Enroll” campaign, trying to encourage people without insurance to not to take advantage of the upcoming health insurance exchanges. Beyond the new “Repealicans” ad, Democrats are continuing to embrace the law, with the help of celebrities, and touting some of the ways in which its reducing costs already. As Jared Bernstein recently pointed out on msnbc, even though just about half the country still doesn’t like the law, it’s still more popular than Congress.
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