RNC Chairman Michael Steele just appeared on CNN, where he continued to make the case that we can’t risk President Obama’s health care proposals at a time when Medicare is going bankrupt. And then something funny happened: Suzanne Malveaux asked him about the fact that the Republicans were the ones who bankrupted it.
Malveaux pointed out that in 2003, the Republicans passed a huge expansion of Medicare, the prescription drug benefit, without any method of paying for it through tax increases or other spending cuts. There then followed this exchange:
Steele: The reality of it is, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. it wasn’t Republicans by themselves, the Democrats were part–
Malveaux: But certainly, Republicans were partly responsible–
Steele: Because you have the White House, and you don’t have the Congress. There’s a partnership here. My point is now, you’ve got one party that’s got control of the entire process here. So this is an opportunity for us to have an honest discussion about how we’re going to address what is fundamentally an important issue to a lot of seniors around the country.
Steele appears to have been mistaken. In fact, Republicans had control of both houses of Congress as well as holding the White House in 2003, albeit by smaller margins than the Democrats do today.
