Yet Another ‘Republican’ Betrayal on ObamaCare

If you live in a state like South Dakota, you’ve become used to “Republicans” selling out the Constitution, the rule of law, and the American people on ObamaCare.

We’ve seen our former governor and newly minted U.S. Senator RINO Mike Rounds, our current governor RINO Dennis Daugaard, and a host of other “Republican” leaders in state government sell us out on ObamaCare.

And we’ve seen “Republicans” in Washington D.C. sell us out on ObamaCare, with one of the biggest surrenders a couple of years ago when they had a chance to defund this unconstitutional monstrosity before it ever got rolling.

Now National Review reports our elected representatives in Washington-and not just the usual Democrat suspects-selling out the taxpayer on illegal ObamaCare subsidies to give themselves taxpayer-funded subsidies they aren’t lawfully entitled to.

The rumors began trickling in about a week before the scheduled vote on April 23: Republican leadership was quietly pushing senators to pull support for subpoenaing Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange — the document that facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from Obamacare by allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies.

The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.” To Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter, who has fought for years against the Obamacare exemption, it was clear that someone in Congress had falsified the document in order to make lawmakers and their staff eligible for taxpayer subsidies provided under the exchange for small-business employees.

You might be surprised at one of the people who has been standing in the way of getting to the bottom of this lawless betrayal of the taxpayers:

though it seems an issue tailor-made for the tea-party star and Republican presidential candidate, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) refused to lend his support. And when the Louisiana senator set a public vote for April 23, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies got involved.

“For whatever reason, leadership decided they wanted that vote to be 5–5, all Republicans, to give Senator Paul cover,” one high-ranking committee staffer tells National Review. “So they worked at a member level to change the votes of otherwise supportive senators.” Four Republicans — senators Mike Enzi, James Risch, Kelly Ayotte, and Deb Fischer — had promised to support Vitter, but that would soon change.

Senate staffers, according to a top committee aide, reported seeing Missouri senator Roy Blunt make calls to at least two Republican committee members, lobbying them, at McConnell’s behest, to vote no on subpoenaing the exchange. By the time the committee was called to quorum, Enzi, Risch, Ayotte, and Fischer voted no.

“We deserve to know who signed that application, because they are robbing taxpayers,” said Michael Cannon, Director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

No kidding. These fatcats work for us, the American taxpayer…or they used to, under the U.S. Constitution. But I suppose it was just too much of a hardship for these Washingtonians to shell out the cash (we’re talking about taxpayer-funded subsidies of between $5,000 and $10,000 per person) that average hard-working Americans have to come up with for themselves.  But with government workers already outpacing private sector salaries, why should we start expecting government employees to stop padding themselves (at taxpayer expense) now?

It appears Rand Paul has gotten more than a little too cozy with his fellow Kentucky senator RINO Mitch McConnell. A man who once seemed to be a real conservative, his behavior over the past couple of years has looked more like a RINO than a real Republican. Fallen in with a bad crowd?  Sure looks like it.

So exactly what sort of exception or loophole did these scoundrels exploit?

The White House scrambled to find a way to allow congressional employees to keep those subsidies. In Washington, D.C., only the small-business exchange allowed them to do so. After secret meetings with House speaker John Boehner in 2013, President Obama instructed the Office of Personnel Management to allow Congress to file for classification as a small business, despite the fact that the law defines a small business as having no more than 50 employees and the House and Senate together employ tens of thousands.

I know. It’s hard to believe that a dedicated, selfless hardcore conservative like John Boehner would join with Barack Obama and other liberals to sell out the taxpayer and the rule of law this way (sorry, had to go puke after using the word “conservative” in conjunction with the name “John Boeher”, I’m okay now), but it’s true.

These guys actually have the audacity to claim that a workforce of 2 million (that’s about how many people work for the federal government) qualifies as a “small business.”  I wonder if they’d allow a free market business with 75 employees to claim that 25 of them actually work for another company, so they don’t have to play by the same rules imposed on everybody else.

When will the American people wake up and stop empowering these liberal enemies of the American people-regardless of the letter after their name-to sell out their freedoms and their prosperity? Obviously it didn’t happen last year; too many conservatives were too desperate to elect “anything but a Democrat” to congress based on the lies from these fake Republicans that they would, contrary to their records, actually behave like Republicans if we sent them to Washington.

America is about done for, thanks to liberals from both parties, and American voters who are too naive or too lazy to insist on better than absolute crap-candidates.  It may be too late to avert this impending national train wreck, but if it isn’t, will this kind of duplicity finally be enough to fire up Americans enough to get them to throw these self-centered nest-featherers out?

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Bob Ellis has been the owner of media company Dakota Voice, LLC since 2005. He is a 10-year U.S. Air Force veteran, a political reporter and commentator for the past decade, and has been involved in numerous election and public policy campaigns for over 20 years. He was a founding member and board member of the Tea Party groups Citizens for Liberty and the South Dakota Tea Party Alliance. He lives in Rapid City, South Dakota with his wife and two children.

Bob Ellis

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