{"id":1822,"date":"2010-04-01T12:58:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T16:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/01\/are-republicans-running-from-their-best-ideas\/"},"modified":"2010-04-01T12:58:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T16:58:00","slug":"are-republicans-running-from-their-best-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/01\/are-republicans-running-from-their-best-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Republicans running from their best ideas?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the weirder aspects of the health care debate has been the spectacle of Republican lawmakers scrambling to distance themselves from their own ideas.<\/p>\n

While governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney helped to pioneer many of the ideas now embedded in the Democratic reform plan.<\/p>\n

Now he talks about the approach as if it were the thin end of a communist wedge.<\/p>\n

Responsible ideas about end-of-life planning were first backed by Republican Senators, who-cosponsored bills with nearly identical language. <\/p>\n

But when Sarah Palin decried the concept as a formula for “death panels,” the GOP’s brightest minds jumped aboard.<\/p>\n

The concept of demanding personal responsibility from Americans by requiring them to pay for their own insurance has been elevated by conservatives into a Constitutional battle.<\/p>\n

But the idea isn’t liberal at all. Most liberals support a government-operated “single payer” system. <\/p>\n

The individual mandate concept grew up out of conservative think-tanks, as an alternative to the more government based “Hillary care” proposed by Democrats in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

“The truth is this is a Republican idea,” said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association, in an interview with the Miami Herald<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Quick pointed out that she first heard of the concept from Senators John McCain, and later from Tommy Thompson, who was George w. Bush’s secretary of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n

The GOP’s muddled fight against the health care would be little more than a curiosity if it weren’t indicative of a much wider confusion on the right.<\/p>\n

Since 2006, Democrats have adopted a number of market-based, conservative ideas first advanced by Republicans.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the GOP has decided that those same ideas are socialist at best and treasonous at worst.<\/p>\n

The cap-and-trade program being floated for dealing with carbon emissions was first developed as a market-driven way of dealing with chemicals that cause acid rain.<\/p>\n

Two of the primary backers of the approach were George W. Bush and North Country Rep. John McHugh, also a Republican.<\/p>\n

Bush even traveled to the Adirondacks to tout the approach, which he called the ‘clear skies’ initiative.<\/p>\n

The concept was simple: Get the bureaucrats out of the way and let industry innovate the fastest, most cost-effective way to cut emissions.<\/p>\n

Yet these days, the concept of cap-and-trade — which worked brilliantly, by the way — is decried by conservatives as a freedom-crushing energy tax.<\/p>\n

Another concept that Republicans pioneered is comprehensive immigration reform. President Bush, John McCain and Lindsey Graham pushed a deal aggressively.<\/p>\n

Now, some conservatives are claiming that a new immigration plan is a Democratic scheme, designed to add 20 million Hispanics to the voting rolls.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next big push will be amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants who are here,\u201d said Rush Limbaugh on his radio program. “Obama\u2019s gonna need their votes in 2012.” <\/p>\n

The take-away from all this is simple: Some of the best ideas in government that have surfaced over the last decade have grown out of Republican circles.<\/p>\n

But for some reason, the Democrats are the ones who have adopted those ideas, and begun the difficult task of implementing them.<\/p>\n

The result is an embarrassing spectacle. Republicans find themselves in the minority, often sniping at the reforms they dreamed up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the weirder aspects of the health care debate has been the spectacle of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}