World News Korner

The Republican plan to sabotage Obamacare. No seriously, there is one.

Courtesy of Politico:

The opposition was strategic from the start: Derail President Barack Obama’s biggest ambition, and derail Obama himself. Party leaders enforced discipline, withholding any support for the new law — which passed with only Democratic votes, thus undermining its acceptance. Partisan divisions also meant that Democrats could not pass legislation smoothing out some rough language in the draft bill that passed the Senate. That left the administration forced to fill far more gaps through regulation than it otherwise would have had to do, because attempts — usually routine — to re-open the bill for small changes could have led to wholesale debate in the Senate all over again.

But the bitter fight over passage was only the beginning of the war to stop Obamacare. Most Republican governors declined to create their own state insurance exchanges — an option inserted in the bill in the Senate to appeal to the classic conservative preference for local control — forcing the federal government to take at least partial responsibility for creating marketplaces serving 36 states — far more than ever intended.

Then congressional Republicans refused repeatedly to appropriate dedicated funds to do all that extra work, leaving the Health and Human Services Department and other agencies to cobble together HealthCare.gov by redirecting funds from existing programs. On top of that, nearly half of the states declined to expand their Medicaid programs using federal funds, as the law envisioned.

Then, in the months leading up to the program’s debut, some states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law. And congressional Republicans sent so many burdensome queries to local hospitals and nonprofits gearing up to help consumers navigate the new system face-to-face that at least two such groups returned their federal grants and gave up the effort. When the White House let it be known last summer that it was in talks with the National Football League to enlist star athletes to help promote the law, the Senate’s top two Republicans sent the league an ominous letter wondering why it would “risk damaging its inclusive and apolitical brand.” The NFL backed off.

The drama culminated on the eve of the open enrollment date of Oct. 1. Congressional Republicans shut down the government, disrupting last-minute planning and limiting the administration’s political ability to prepare the public for the likelihood of potential problems, because it was in a last-ditch fight to defend the president’s biggest legislative accomplishment.

The Republicans have clearly known since the beginning that if the implementation of this law were successful that it would spell doom for their party. How else to explain the extremes to which they have good to stop it?

But is there even more that we don't know about?

Take a look at this from Buzzfeed:

Republicans’ new Obamacare attack line hinges on allegations that the contractor in charge of building the disastrous healthcare.gov website landed the gig through sweetheart deals from the Obama administration.

But according to Federal Election Commission records, that company’s PAC gave more to House Republicans than House Democrats during the 2012 cycle — including a $2,000 check for the GOP’s chief scandal investigator, Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa. What’s more, executives of CGI Federal personally gave more than twice as much to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney than to President Obama. The contractor has also feasted on more than $2.4 billion worth of IT work dating back to the early Bush Administration.

So far, none of that has stopped the Republican National Congressional Committee from suggesting CGI netted hundreds of millions of dollars to create the dysfunctional website because of its ties to the White House.

Yet FEC records indicate executives for CGI gave $5,550 to GOP Romney and just $2,000 to Obama — not quite the behavior of a company indebted to the president for its contacting jackpots.

Also, the company’s PAC, CGI-AMS, gave $48,000 to 28 GOP members of the House including $5,000 to Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), $6,000 to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), and $2,000 each to Issa, Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), now-Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.). Yoder, Wolf, and Cole also sit on the Appropriations Committee. Issa, Wolf and Cole also received contributions from the PAC during the 2010 cycle.

Attempts to reach Issa, Yoder, and Wolf were unsuccessful Thursday.

The PAC gave $32,000 to 13 Democratic House members. They also gave $29,500 to Democrats running for Senate and $19,000 to Republican Senate candidates, reflecting a savvy record of giving more to members of the parties in power in each chamber.

The bipartisan giving makes sense given that CGI’s first federal contract for IT work started in 2001 and, as a multibillion-dollar firm, has many lobbying interests in congress.

In fact, USASpending.gov, the federal site tracking government contracts, shows CGI has been the contractor of choice for a wide range of computer systems work throughout the Bush Administration, including hundreds of multimillion-dollar contracts for the Departments of Defense, Agriculture and Health and Human Services.

The contract under which CGI did the Obamacare website work, in fact, began in 2007 as a contract with HHS to handle Medicare and Medicaid IT.

When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 with all of its tentacles intersecting with those programs, there was almost no way CGI wasn’t going to get to expand the scope of their existing contract, contracting experts say. Federal contracting rules are strict — so as to avoid political meddling — and they favor entrenched, large companies with track records. And if the case of CGI’s shoddy work doesn’t appear to represent partisan favoritism, it does appear to underscore broader problems with the system.

You know there was once a time that I believed in coincidences in politics.

Those days are no more.

If you think there is a low to which the Republican would not go, then you don't know today's Republican party.

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