Hewitt: Three GOP senators to watch for health care, cap and tax votes

[Our note: Olympia Snowe (R-ME) was one of the three RINO senators who handed the president the crucial votes needed to pass his “stimulus” bill victory in January.]

Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Blue Dogs Bark and Run Away; The Senate GOP Does Not Fold
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt

Yesterday’s news that the “Blue Dogs” among the House Democrats folded up and skittered away after a few barks for the media was not surprising. They will end up adding a bill voting for the destruction of American medicine to their cap-and-tax-and-tax-and-tax bill (also known as the China-India-Empowerment Act), and Henry Waxman will have what he needs a ticket to the conference committee which he intends to dominate.

Three GOP senators —Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Charles Grassley of Iowa, and Olympia Snowe of Maine— hold the key to stopping the Obama/Pelosi/Waxman plan by refusing to send a bill to the Senate floor and then on to conference…GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell said on my program yesterday:

“It’s subject to cloture, but it’s not amendable, and we only have 40 members of my party. And even if we were entirely unified, we would not have enough votes to prevent it. So it will get worse. I mean, the best bill you might ever see would be some kind of bill in the Finance Committee that would get worse in the course of the legislative process…we don’t, so far, like much of anything we see in this big government, high tax, mandate approach that the Democratic majority and the President would like to pass.”

In the weeks ahead, voters are going to have to focus their effort to stop Obamacare on these three Republicans and on about a dozen Democratic senators, while also keeping up the pressure on the lame Blue Dogs. If enough of the later get enough of a message during their time back in the district, it could indeed give them more bite than bark as the end game opens in the fall.

Byron York notes that the tumbling numbers on the president’s approval rating and for his plan are changing the political ground rapidly, and as more and more Americans realize that their health insurance is endangered by the Obama/Pelosi/Waxman radical rewrite of American medicine, they will get active in the fight against it. Obamacare already has the distinct look of a political suicide note to it, but as the ink dries, there will be even more clarity about that, and greater pressure to kill it or water it down to a subsidy for the poor seeking insurance.

Hewitt’s entire article and a Free Our Health Care petition is at TownHall.com

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