Wasserman Schultz on Health Care Bill: This Passed Without Any Republican Support by Their Choice.
This is going to be the new Republican theme:Issa: Well, it's certainly one that we expected. We expected to lose. What we didn't expect, quite candidly, was to be shut out of the process from the very beginning.
Firstly, the Republicans certainly never "expected to lose", as their own previous statements verify.
Dick Morris, Fox News commentator, November 4: “A deathblow to ObamaCare.”So, it's quite false for the Republicans to pretend, as Isaa does here, that they expected to lose and that they were excluded from the process. Debbie Wasserman Schultz does well to nail Issa on this lie:– Fred Barnes, Fox News commentator, January 20: “The health care bill, ObamaCare, is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection.”
– Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, January 26: “That’s why Obamacare is dead.”
– Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Minority Whip, February 24: “Speaker Pelosi doesn’t have the votes in the House. . . . It is futile for for them to continue to try and push something on the American people that frankly won’t result in better health care.”
– Cantor, March 5: “Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have the votes needed to pass a health-care bill in the House of Representatives.”
– Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Minority Leader, March 14: “If she had 216 votes, this bill would be long gone. They tried to pass it in September, October, November, December, January, February. Guess what? They don’t have the votes.”
– Boehner, March 17: Health care reform will pass “over my dead body.”
– Cantor, March 19: “[T]here’s no way they can pass this bill.”
Schultz: That is just a brazenly false statement. From the very beginning...The problem at the core of the Republican attitude to all of this has not changed. They lied about what was actually in the bill by talking about death panels and other nonsense; and, now that their great plan has come to naught, they lie about why they failed to stop the bill by claiming that they were "shut out from the process".
Issa: Is that like you lied?
Schultz: No, it's a brazenly false (crosstalk). With all due respect there are two hundred amendments that were offered and accepted by Republicans, offered by Republicans and accepted by Democrats and incorporated into this bill. This is a bill that is bipartisan in content, unfortunately not bipartisan in the outcome of the votes. We gave every opportunity over and over again and the American people saw a President in Obama extend his hand and saw Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid ask Republicans repeatedly to sit down with the rest of the negotiating table and we were repeatedly rejected.
It's a lie that should not be allowed to stand.
Even David Frum, in what I am sure will become an often quoted column, pointed out that the Republicans engineered their own disaster by listening to "the most radical voices in the party and the movement" and that listening to these very people "led us to abject and irreversible defeat."
Issa is merely mouthing the latest Republican lie. That the Republicans did not hope to defeat the bill through simple obstructionism, but that they were locked out of the process.
They were dishonest throughout the debate, and it appears as if they are going to continue to be dishonest after it.
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