This is not a post on whether or not The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a good thing or not. Like most legislation it has its good parts and its bad parts, but that is not what I care about today. What I want to talk about is the stupid partisanship surrounding the whole issue.
Republicans are setting into motion a dangerous new way of doing things which the Democrats, being idiots, will probably jump right on board with. This whole notion of extreme opposition is ridiculous and extremely harmful to our country, any yet that seems to be the ultimate political goal these days.
I suppose it all started back in the 2000 election, when the recounts, court battles, and political ire reached new heights of partisan absurdity, and it’s all been downhill from there. It seems that the whole goal of the Republican party is to stop Obama from doing anything. That is not a good goal. If the two sides of government are going to be spending all of their energy not letting each other do anything, then we are wasting a lot of money on a broken and useless government. Why do we even need a government?
And it’s all just a huge waste of time. Yesterday, Obamacare was upheld as fully constitutional by the Supreme Court. Years of fighting it led to the highest court in the land saying that Obamacare was okay, by use of semantics, the most powerful tool that courts and politicians have. Republicans have spent huge amounts of time and money fighting this thing (after it had already passed, which is when it should have ended), and even now some of them are not finished. GOP leaders have vowed to keep fighting against this bill, even calling the Supreme Court decision a boon in their ongoing war.
What are they up to in Washington? Not thinking up new ideas for this country, that’s for sure. They are squabbling and bickering and trying to keep each other down just for the sake of keeping each other down. That is not what this country needs.
And what is so wrong with Obamacare anyway? Is it the individual mandate requiring everyone to have health insurance? Sure, that’s annoying, but I am required to have car insurance or else face penalties/taxes, which is also annoying. Why am I forced to have car insurance just because I have a car? Well, it’s to protect other people financially. The government has decided to infringe on my personal freedoms in order to protect other citizens from my potential mistakes. In that light, it only makes sense that everyone with a body be required to have health insurance, since emergency rooms will take you no matter what. Don’t hospitals deserve to be paid as much as that guy you just plowed into on the interstate? All I’m saying is, agree or disagree, this bill is not so far fetched that we need to spend years fighting it at the expense of helping the country in other ways.
This is an election year, as you may have noticed, and it is only going to get worse. If the Republicans want to win the election, they need to make sure that Obama looks like a failure, and what better way to do that than to make sure that he fails? But the issue is this: winning the election for your party ought to be secondary to the needs of the country. I don’t mean to make wild accusations, but many top Republicans officials have been quoted as saying that their top priority is the political destruction of Barack Obama. If Obama wins in the fall, I expect they will continue their harassment in hopes of winning in 2016. And if Romney wins? The Democrats are slow learners, but I think they are starting to catch on. I feel confident that “Romney Blocking” will be a major tool in their political arsenal in the hopes of winning back the presidency four years later.
The sad part is, all of this hate and vitriol has spilled out onto the voters as well. My Facebook wall is filled with negative posts from my conservative friends and triumphal victory posts mocking the conservatives from my liberal friends. Friends. Take a step back. Breathe. Don’t get caught up in the political posturing. I think we can all agree that both parties are pretty terrible and you are wasting a lot of energy supporting one of them. Obamacare has passed. It’s legal and constitutional. Move on to the next thing. Let’s actually get something done in this country.