Several new House Republicans who will take over power in Congress this week had their coming out party on the various Sunday public affairs shows, and they came out firing in declaring how they intend to shake up the status quo over the past two years in Washington.
Lots of Republicans have discussed how they'll try to dismantle the federal health care reform legislation in a piecemeal fashion, since it's obvious that President Obama would never sign a bill that kills the bill.
However, that's not what Michigan Representative Fred Upton, the incoming chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, is thinking. Upton said on Fox News Sunday that, yes, in fact, he thinks some wayward House Democrats can team with the GOP to get a veto proof majority to outright end the legislation.
"As part of our pledge we said that we would bring up a vote to repeal health care early. That will happen before the president's State of the Union address. We have 242 Republicans. There will be a significant number of Democrats, I think, that will join us. You will remember when that vote passed in the House, last march; it only passed by seven votes. "Just wait. If you switched four votes from last march, that bill would have gone down. So we'll take the Democrats that voted no, we will take other Democrats who probably agree with Speaker Pelosi's statement. Remember when she said we want to pass this thing because then we'll learn what's in it? Well now the American public does know what is in it. Unpopularity numbers are as high as 60 percent across the country. I don't think we're going to be that far off from having the votes to actually override a veto."
Pretty bold talk. The other question that the talk show hosts were eager to hear from the incoming Republicans was whether or not the Tea Party influence could affect them in voting to increase the federal debt's $14.3 trillion ceiling.
Such a vote has been written about for months in policy journals, as sort of the ultimate vote is to see how many "true-believer" fiscal conservative types would vote not to raise the debt ceiling, as odious as it might be for them to do so. But not to vote for the debt ceiling could see the U.S. Government default on its obligations, as White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said on ABC's This Week.
This is not…this is not a game. You know, the debt ceiling is not…is not something to toy with. That's the…the…if we hit the debt ceiling, that's the…essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. I mean, that would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008.
"As I say, that's not a game. I don't see why anybody's talking about playing chicken with the…with the debt ceiling.
"If…if we get to the point where you've damaged the full faith and credit of the United States, that would…that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity."
This article appears in Dec 30, 2010 – Jan 5, 2011.