After three long years of cautious resistance to comprehensive replacement of ObamaCare, the House Republican leadership seems ready to approve of legislative hearings and eventual House action on major proposals to that effect -- namely, to proactively support the Republican Study Committee's HR 3121 (with well over 100 co-sponsors) and Rep./Dr. Tom Price's overlapping HR 2300 (with over 40 co-sponsors).
These two proposals -- like Rep. Price's HR 3400 in 2011 and HR 3000 in 2012 -- can all be traced back to the March 2010 House debates and razor-thin 219-212 House passage of ObamaCare. It was then that GOP leaders (then in the minority) proposed a comprehensive "Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute" -- which would almost surely have passed and would have "partial-birth aborted" ObamaCare, but which was quickly "tabled" on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's party-line procedural vote instead.
Since then, the GOP leadership, believing that a) free-standing repeal without replacement or b) repeal via defunding or c) the Supreme Court might solve the problem, and fearing also that deeply divided Republicans would fall into self-destructive warfare over what total replacement should involve, opted to avoid such intra-party conflict.
But now that hoped-for rescue by the Supreme Court, by bare-bones repeal, and by bare-bones defunding have all failed, the House GOP is finally -- some say very belatedly -- returning to the "regular order" legislative process of crafting what will be called "De Facto Repeal via Comprehensive Replacement."
An Early Appeal in the American Thinker
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
