NOT THAT YOU ASKED
I want to show you a quote I ran across last week. "Is Arkansas going to be an enabler for Obamacare and the Washington D.C. interests who seek to impose their will on us? Or are we going to hold the line on behalf of the people of Arkansas in opposition to this dreadful law?" Those were the words of House Majority Leader Bruce Westerman during the first day of debate on continuing to fund the private option plan for the Affordable Care Act in Little Rock.
The reason that quote caught my eye is because if you took out the word Obamacare, and replaced it with integration or Brown v. Board of Education, it would read just like something Orval Faubus or Jim Johnson might have said back in 1957 during the integration of Central High School. Every time I think we've made progress in this state, some idiot in the Legislature says something like that, that shows me how little progress we have made.
You would think that by 2014 Southern legislators would have realized that the issue of state's rights was settled a long time ago. It took the Civil War, and then the Civil Rights Movement to do it, but it has been settled. Federal law trumps state law every time, and that's just the way it is. Maybe we should require state legislators to read the U.S. Constitution before they are sworn in.
As I am writing this, the state house has still refused to pass the private option funding, even though it has gotten a majority of the votes cast each time it has been voted on. It may have passed by the time you read this, but the simple fact is, Obamacare is the law of the land, and will remain so, no matter what the Arkansas Legislature does. It's time they realized that.
I don't know how much of the opposition to the law is based on dislike of the law itself, or opposition, and even hatred of the President. In some cases it may be a combination of both. Regardless of that, no matter how fervently some of our legislators may cling to the idea of state's rights, only the President or Congress in Washington can repeal or amend Obamacare. Until that happens, we just have to live with it.
What is especially maddening about this is that there are some Republicans, both in Little Rock, and Washington who may agree with the President on this issue, or some other, but they can't say so publically because their party is being held hostage by the Tea Party crazies. They know that if they speak out publicly in support of Obama, or one of his policies, they will have to face a
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