One thing Hollywood knows how to do is to give audi ences a “cheer moment” when the underdog finally turns on his adversaries — Rocky’s first, bone-crushing left hook against Apollo Creed, for example. As the 112th Congress convenes next week, that’s what many Americans will be expecting from the 63 new Republican House members and five new Republican senators. The first thing they’re going to have to rock back on its heels is ObamaCare.
Tea Partiers, start your engines. The great battle for the soul and future of America is about to begin.
The first battlefield will be the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was forced down the gullets of the American people at Christmas 2009 despite their vehement opposition — and that will soon enough generate at least 100,000 pages of regulations. Not even the surprise election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, who campaigned on his pledge to be the 40th Republican vote against the bill in the Senate, had any effect on the Democrats. Through a toxic combination of parliamentary maneuver and outright bribery, ObamaCare was rammed through and signed into law in March of this year.
The law stands as a monument to government’s contempt for its citizens, a breathtaking power grab by the Democrats, using the fig leaves of the Commerce and General Welfare clauses of the Constitution.
“Are you serious?” responded Nancy Pelosi, when asked to explain how the “individual mandate” could be constitutional. Unfortunately for the outgoing House speaker, Federal Judge Henry Hudson yanked away those fig leaves when he ruled on Dec. 13 that Congress has no constitutional right to force American citizens to purchase anything, and that a private decision not to do something cannot be regulated under the Commerce Clause.
There will be plenty of legal tests ahead (other federal judges have ruled the bill constitutional) and the whole mess is heading for the Supreme Court. But time is on the side of the Democrats — the bill’s “goodies” will have started kicking in long before the court is likely to rule, and if there’s one thing we know about government programs, they are almost impossible to kill once they begin to twine their tentacles around the American people.
So the time to deal a body blow to ObamaCare is now. Since all spending bills must originate in the House, it will be up to the Republican majority there to first defund it, then to repeal it. Indeed, if they play their cards just right, ObamaCare can be the wedge issue that finally exposes liberal do-goodism for what it really is: coercion with a smiley face, cloaked in the false mantle of “compassion.”
Sure, repeal is unlikely to get through the Senate in this term, and even if it did President Obama would veto it. But the folks who elected the new Congress don’t care. It’s the principle that counts: Not only do anti-constitutional government programs like ObamaCare make us less free, they make us less self-reliant as well. The politics of repeal are right as well. Dispirited Americans watched the lame-duck kamikaze Congress piloted by Harry Reid flip them the bird as they ploughed ahead with their agenda.
So let’s see it, 112th Congress. Defund ObamaCare. Hold hearings on the bill and force the left to defend its provisions. Pass a repeal bill, such as HR 4972, sponsored by Rep. Steve King of Iowa and see what happens.
Washington isn’t broken. It’s out of control, and the American people are shouting no mas! The first order of business is for the Republicans to stand upright, spinally stiffened — and to finally throw that first Rocky punch.
Michael A. Walsh, a former associ ate editor of Time, is the author of “Hostile Intent” and “Early Warning” and, writing as David Kahane, “Rules for Radical Conservatives.