GOP Senate Leader: A Dinosaur Who Needs to Go

The Halo Effect Won't Help This Guy: He Needs to Retire or Not Seek Reelection

Memo to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the GOP Senate Minority Leader (and I use the term "leader" in a very loose way): Get out!!!

Story that got my attention is from the Natonal Journal here in part:

(Right after McConnell heard the USSC's approval of "Obama-care") he said to a trusted aide, "This decision is too cute. But I think we got something with this tax issue."

He was referring to the court’s ruling that the heart of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the so-called individual mandate that requires everyone in the country to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, was a tax. And while McConnell thought calling the mandate a tax was “a rather creative way” to uphold the law, it also opened a new front in his battle to repeal it.

(The dinosaur/or if you choose, the Frankenstein analogy now kicks in): McConnell, a master of Byzantine Senate procedure, immediately realized that, as a tax, the individual mandate would be subject to the budget reconciliation process, which exempted it from the filibuster. In other words, McConnell had just struck upon how to repeal Obama care with a simple majority vote.

He then called a handful of top aides into his office and told them, “Figure out how to repeal this through reconciliation. I want to do this.” McConnell ordered a repeal plan ready in the event the GOP took back control of the Senate in November (2012) — ironic considering Democrats used the same process more than two years earlier in a successful, last-shot effort to muscle the reforms into law.

Well, 2012 and that "plan" didn't turn out too good. However, now he has his sights set on 2014, not only with his reelection bid in KY (and hopefully, he thinks) his win, the pie-in-the-sky dream to take back the Senate and then move his plan to repeal Obama-care forward once and for all.

My first guess is that McConnell and the GOP in general with their persistent move to repeal health care are quite frankly trying to piss up a rope -- and the sustained results will be the same with not only the back splash but the public backlash ... people want the health care, and if any adjustments are needed (as they usually are), then make them, but keep the concept in place ... why? IT IS WORKING.