This is another one of those bills that Obama and Harry Reid sluff off as "meaningless," by which they mean, "Stop passing those bills we don't like!" If a bill passes the House of Representatives, and both the Senate leadership and the president pretend it never happened, the only thing that's meaningless is the attitude of the president and Senate leadership toward the legislative process.
This time it's H.R. 2009, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia), and it prohibits the IRS from having any role in the enforcement of ObamaCare. Given the recent misadventures of Lois Lerner et al, you don't suppose the public would have any positive inclinations toward this idea, do you? (Thanks to our friend and former colleague Ellen Carmichael, now a Price staffer, for getting the information to us quickly.)
Here's what Price says about the bill:
By voting to prohibit the IRS from implementing or enforcing any part of President Obama’s health care law, the House of Representatives has taken an important step toward protecting the health care of American citizens today. The Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act has the support of over 140 cosponsors in the House and has been endorsed by numerous organizations and thousands of Americans who share our commitment to preventing any of our fellow citizens from having to answer to the IRS when it comes to their personal health care decisions.
The IRS clearly has not been able to prudently and impartially enforce current tax laws. It has abused its authority by targeting individuals and organizations. There’s no reason to trust this massive agency with one of the most personal aspects of our lives – our health care.
Instead, we ought to be empowering individuals and families to make their own health care decisions. There are many positive ways to pursue a patient-centered health care system. But to get there, we need the Obama Administration and Senate Democrats to stop siding with the Washington bureaucracy and to start standing up for the rights and health care choices of the American people.
He's a physician, by the way, so he brings more knowledge and authority to this argument than most. And it doesn't take someone with special inside knowledge these days to know that the IRS has been compromised by political agendas and cannot be trusted to enforce this law fairly. Better yet, Price suggests we repeal ObamaCare altogether and replace it with a new system he outlines in H.R. 2300, which the boss wrote about a few weeks back.
There's room for discussion about exactly what should replace ObamaCare, of course. I'd like to see something that dramatically reduces the reliance on health insurance, essentially relegating it to covering catastrophic costs only. But what most people don't realize is that the need for something better to replace ObamaCare is taken very seriously among Republicans, with lots of good ideas being debated all the time. They all have their pros and cons, I suppose, but one thing they all have in common is that every one of them is better than ObamaCare by galaxies.
And as for H.R. 2009, if Harry Reid is determined to ignore this and refuse to let the Senate take it up, and Obama is determined to call it "meaningless," Republicans should force them to justify their insistence on giving the IRS this power over the rest of our lives. If left to their own devices, they will pretend it is not even happening. They should not be allowed to do that.
