We all know that the Republican party wants to repeal the health care law. And the financial reform law. And roll back spending to the levels they were at during the Bush administration. And tie Obama’s hands so he can’t issue new regulations, or has to undo old ones.
When you add it all up, what you get is a huge chunk of the entire Obama presidency that Republicans apparently simply want to erase. The Obama administration has done more than just the above, but, if you eliminate those things, suddenly his first two years look pretty unremarkable.
Sure, we all had a good laugh when Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for “repeal[ing] this president.” What’s interesting, though, is that if you put this question to other Republicans — are you trying to repeal the entire Obama presidency? — they ignore his popularity and incumbency and basically admit, ‘yes, that’s the goal.’
“Let’s not forget what happened November 2nd,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. “We have always said the election was not necessarily an endorsement of anything that the Republicans were about at the time. It was an absolute repudiation of what has gone on in this town over the last couple of years. What we are trying to say by proposing the spending cuts, by saying that we need to repeal ObamaCare and begin to replace it with the kind of health care that Americans want, when we say we have got to look at the impact of Dodd-Frank, what we are saying is that the things that were done were so extreme and outside the mainstream of where most Americans were.”
The health care law continues to have higher unfavorables than favorables — but not by much. And the constituency that wants the GOP to focus intently on full repeal of the law is marginal.
But that doesn’t change the GOP’s mind one bit. Put the same question to other conservative members, you get similar answers.
“I ran on that — this needs to be the ‘undo Congress,'” said Rep. Steve King (R-IA). “We need to undo the Obama agenda. I’ve gone down through the list of things that need to be undone. The investment banks that have been bought up… I want to be completely out of that. AIG should be sold off, Fannie and Freddie should be moved toward privatization. The government should get rid of their shares in General Motors and Chrysler. And yes we should abolish ObamaCare. If we do all of that, well all we’ve done is taken back about half of the private sector economy that we had when Obama was elected president.”
And beyond those issues?
“The financial reform is an important one, I’m glad you brought it up,” King added. “There aren’t many people talking about that. Dodd-Frank needs to go. And I’d repeal the Community Reinvestment Act while we’re at it.”
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) feels much the same way.
“Absolutely,” he told me, when I put the question to him.
“I think the American people recognize that there was a drastic turn to the left under this administration, and under Speaker Pelosi as well in her four year reign,” Price added. “And by virtue of their opportunity to voice that last November said ‘stop the madness.’ We’re engaged in trying to stop the madness.”
Price did acknowledge that the status quo circa 2008 was not good — particularly vis-Ã -vis health care — and that once the last two years are erased, Republicans will have to start working on fixing things. But not before erasing Barack Obama’s accomplishments, full stop.
It’s not just the House either. Here’s what Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told a conservative crowd at CPAC Thursday morning: To fix the economy, he said, Republicans should “wipe the entire Obama agenda off the table and start from scratch.”
