Poll: Those ‘meaningless repeal votes’ Obama hates reflect the will of the nation

Among his other talking points trying to blame Republicans for the failure of his economic policies, President Obama whined yesterday that they keep taking "meaningless repeal votes" on ObamaCare.

Let's talk about that. First, when one house of Congress passes a bill, it is not meaningless. It is one of the necessary steps toward the passage of a law. So it certainly has meaning. Now, you can argue that it's without much effect because the other two steps - passage by the Senate and the signature of the president - are not going to happen. And the current political reality is that this is true. But that leaves open the question of whether it should be true, and to the extent the wishes of the American people have anything to do with it, a new poll indicates the wrongheaded actions are not from those who keep voting to repeal ObamaCare, but from those who keep preventing it from happening. Yes, it's a Fox News poll, and it was conducted jointly by a Republican polling firm and a Democratic one, so just stop with that nonsense. Look at these numbers:

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By a large 47-11 percent margin, voters expect the 2010 health care law will cost them rather than save them money in the coming year. Another 34 percent think the law won't change their family's health care costs. Those negative expectations come at a time when a majority of the public remains unhappy with the way thing are going in the country (63 percent dissatisfied), and over half say they haven't seen any signs the economy has started to turn the corner (57 percent). Republicans are three times as likely as Democrats to think ObamaCare will cost them money over the next year (70 percent vs. 23 percent). One Democrat in five expects the law will result in savings for their family (21 percent). The poll asks people to take an up-or-down vote on ObamaCare: 40 percent say they would vote to keep the law in place, while just over half -- 53 percent -- would repeal it. Over half of those under age 45 (51 percent) as well as those 45 and over (56 percent) would vote to repeal ObamaCare. Most Republicans want the law repealed (by 85-13 percent) and so do independents (by 65-25 percent). Most Democrats favor keeping ObamaCare (by 72-21 percent).

The margin among independents is crushing, and if I'm an ObamaCare guy, I'm taking no comfort from the fact that Democrats wanting it repealed is at 21 percent. Americans can see what a boondoggle this is, even with the mainstream media trying to cover Obama's flank on it. They see the costs are way more than they were told. They see insurance premiums are going up, not down. They see that they can't necessarily keep their old plan if they liked it. They see that the administration doesn't have its act together in rolling it out. They see that it's causing employers to pull back from hiring. If they look a little deeper, they'll see that it's going to cause shortages of care, and that all the new taxes are going to have a real negative impact on an already weak economy. And as for the things it's supposedly delivered, like banning the denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, the truth is that the economic distortions ObamaCare perpetrated in order to deliver on that promise are going to cause so many new problems with health care finance, people will quickly realize there were much better ways to solve that problem. So why exactly are those House repeal votes meaningless? Only because the House is the only arm of the government listening to the American people - and dealing with the reality of a fatally flawed law - and stepping up to solve the problem by getting rid of it. Someone needs to ask the president why he and Harry Reid continue to make those votes meaningless by refusing to follow suit and get rid of ObamaCare.