Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) said he’s “appalled” with the way his party led the opposition to the Affordable Care Act prior to the law’s problematic rollout.
“The more we dig into it, I’m sort of appalled that the Republican Party … didn’t explain more carefully the things we already know about Obamacare, when we could’ve kept the president on defense the whole fall campaign,” Gingrich told Politico in an interview published Monday. “I think we didn’t do our job as an opposition party and the press didn’t do its job.”
Although Obamacare figured prominently in last year’s election and the GOP-controlled House has voted to repeal it more than 40 times, Gingrich is just the latest Republican to argue that the law hasn’t been properly debated.
Jim DeMint, the former GOP senator who now leads the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in an interview published in September that Mitt Romney’s presence at the top of the ticket precluded Republicans from litigating the law in 2012. And Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said last month that there hasn’t really been “a big debate about Obamacare really since it passed in Congress.”
