I’ve been out of the loop since Thursday dealing with the revelation that my son has cancer and all that it will mean for my family over the next few months. So if you’re wondering why I haven’t posted since Thursday and you don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter to hear the news that’s why. My inbox was filled up by some wicked opposition research from the Santorum campaign all of which have been backed up by video of statements Romney has made. Romney it must really suck that Santorum has money for opposition research now doesn’t it?
Those who are voting tomorrow… use your brain. Look at Romney’s record, not his rhetoric. His rhetoric is useless if it can’t be backed up by action.
He has criticized Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich over earmarks (he should have lumped Ron Paul in there since he’s requested them even though he votes against the earmarks he requests). He has prided himself in being a “Washington outsider” and then we have the video below that was released by ABC News from his 2002 Gubernatorial campaign in Massachusetts:
So apparently he’s ok with receiving and asking for earmarks. Pinning for taxpayer money is a ok in his book, but nobody else. What a hypocrite.
Romney says he’s ok with the individual mandate at the state level, but doesn’t favorite it at the federal level. Once again we see that Romney’s rhetoric doesn’t match up with his record. We see via Buzzfeed something they found an op/ed that Romney wrote to President Obama via USA Today.
Health care cannot be handled the same way as the stimulus and cap-and-trade bills. With those, the president stuck to the old style of lawmaking: He threw in every special favor imaginable, ground it up and crammed it through a partisan Democratic Congress. Health care is simply too important to the economy, to employment and to America’s families to be larded up and rushed through on an artificial deadline. There’s a better way. And the lessons we learned in Massachusetts could help Washington find it….
…Our experience also demonstrates that getting every citizen insured doesn’t have to break the bank. First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others. This doesn’t cost the government a single dollar. Second, we helped pay for our new program by ending an old one — something government should do more often. The federal government sends an estimated $42 billion to hospitals that care for the poor: Use those funds instead to help the poor buy private insurance, as we did.
His problem tomorrow during the Ohio Primary, as Jeffrey Anderson points out in The Weekly Standard is that in Ohio, voters rejected the very thing that he has defended time and time again.
Roughly eight months later, in the immediate aftermath of Obamacare’s passage, Romney called for repealing “the worst aspects of Obamacare,” saying that he hoped we could ultimately “repeal the bad and keep the good.” When comparing his Massachusetts health care overhaul with Obamacare at that time, Romney said, “I like some of the similarities.”
Since then, Romney seems to have come around to full repeal. Moreover, he now argues that an individual mandate is unconstitutional at the federal level, while still defending such mandates at the state level.
The problem for Romney, both with his apparent prior support for a federal mandate and his ongoing defense of state-based mandates, is that Ohio voters recently rejected all such mandates in rather emphatic fashion. Just four months ago, Buckeye State voters supported a ballot measure that said, in part, “In Ohio, no law or rule shall compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in a health care system.” Even though the vote was among all Ohio voters and not merely those who will be voting in the upcoming Republican primary, the measure passed by a whopping 32 percentage points (66 to 34 percent), won in all 88 of Ohio’s counties, and won in 81 of those counties by margins of at least 20 points.
Andrew McCarthy at National Review (a publication who endorsed him back in 2008) sees through his BS:
In the context of urging on the president “the lessons we learned in Massachusetts” that “could help Washington find” a better way to reform healthcare, Gov. Romney explained, “[W]e established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves, rather than pass their medical costs on others.”
This seems very significant. A number of us have expressed concerns that Romney cannot effectively confront Obama on Obamacare, the wrongheadedness and unpopularity of which make it the Republicans’ most crucial issue in the campaign. In response, Romney posits that he is a Tenth Amendment guy who saw what he was doing as right for his state, and perhaps other states, but certainly not a national model to be adopted at the federal level. For what it’s worth, I’ve contended that those claims are utterly unpersuasive (some are downright frivolous). But that hardly matters now. The op-ed demonstrates that Mitt regarded Romneycare precisely as a model the federal government ought to adopt, and that the “tax penalties” by which Massachusetts’s individual mandate are enforced were a good fit for Congress and the Obama administration to impose by federal law…
Again we can see we can’t trust what he says because it changes to what ever he thinks people want to hear. Look at his record. Below we have two separate interviews from Meet the Press in 2007 and 2009. In both he shows support for a National Healthcare Mandate:
From 2007:
Below from a 2008 debate Romney and Fred Thompson have an exchange on mandates which Romney admits he likes:
Below is a comparison of RomneyCare vs. ObamaCare distributed by FamiliesUSA based on infomation gathered by John McDonough (who the liberal group FamiliesUSA describes as “deeply involved in the design, passage, and implementation” of RomneyCare AND ObamaCare).
What will it take for some people to finally understand that Romney can not be trusted and that his only core value is to win at any cost.
Related articles
- Good Grief… Romney Urged Obama to Embrace Individual Mandate in Obamacare (thegatewaypundit.com)
- Romney and the Mandate (realclearpolitics.com)
- Super Tuesday Eve: What to Expect Tomorrow (townhall.com)
- On Health Care, ObamaCare and RomneyCare Will Hurt Ohio Families (redstate.com)
- Mitt Romney repeatedly urged President Obama to use Romneycare and its mandate as national model (dailykos.com)
