The Patriot Post® · On ObamaCare's Birthday, Ballooning Problems
The President can blow out the candles on ObamaCare’s birthday, but he can’t put out the fire over his signature policy. ObamaCare turned four over the weekend, and White House officials have blown through $52 million of advertising propaganda to promote the policy – but with little to show for it, pollsters say. According to the latest Pew Research Survey, ObamaCare may be older, but Americans don’t believe it’s wiser. Despite a 48-month adjustment perior, the toll on families’ wallets, lives, jobs, and freedom remains a major drag on the President’s health care law.
While this four-year-old still toddles through implementation, the system remains as unpopular as ever. Fifty-three percent of the country still disapprove of ObamaCare – a statistic that cash prizes, NBA endorsements, happy hours, and comedy shows hasn’t budged. Just one-point down from the highest opposition ever recorded, Americans are still struggling to come to grips with their cancelled policies, premium hikes, and lost liberty. And their frustration, Pew explains, crosses demographic lines. Support from young people and Hispanics continues to freefall, as the Obama administration frantically tries to change these key constituencies’ minds before the March 31 deadline.
But despite missing nearly every target, Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) continue to live in denial about the policy’s impact on everyday Americans. It’s a “winner,” she insisted when asked about ObamaCare’s liabilities in the upcoming election. “We don’t weigh [the law’s] value as to what it means politically,” she explained to a surprised press corps. “We weigh its value as to what it means to the health, well-being, economic security of America’s families.”
Unfortunately for Democrats, who are desperate to stop the issue from torpedoing their campaigns, ObamaCare’s “value” took another nosedive last week, when the insurance industry warned that premium rates could double – and in some regions, triple – over the summer. Unfortunately for Americans, the law’s greatest cost won’t be its $3 trillion price tag – but the cost in human life, since it makes taxpayers unwilling contributors in the abortion of unborn children. Anyone enrolled with an insurance company that covers abortion will be reaching into their own pockets to help pay for it. That means, as long as ObamaCare is celebrating birthdays, plenty of innocent babies won’t.
The next greatest casualty is religious liberty, which seems to be caught underfoot in the President’s stampede toward federally-funded abortion. As part of this colossal, 2,700-page mistake, the President who promised to “honor conscience” invented the leeway to violate everyone else’s. This week, that battle will reach its boiling point as Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood take their fight against the HHS mandate to its final stop: the U.S. Supreme Court. There, the hopes of thousands of businesses rest, as these two families defend their right to operate their companies in accordance with their orthodox religious beliefs. Both businesses face crippling fines of $36,500 per employee per year for refusing to comply with the administration’s demand that they offer insurance policies that cover pills and procedures they morally oppose.
On Saturday, while these companies battle in court for the freedom our nation was founded on, you can stand with them. If you have a Facebook page, change your profile photo to show your support (click here to find out how). Then, shop at Hobby Lobby on March 29 and say “thank you” with a card from your family – and share those photos of the trip using the #HobbyLobbyDay hashtag on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
SPLC: Teaching (Zero) Tolerance
In Hawaii, SPLC isn’t just teaching the lessons – they may be learning one, courtesy of state Representative Bob McDermott. The conservative leader, who is also tackling the state’s controversial sex education curriculum, won’t give up until he’s kicked the Southern Poverty Law Center’s bribery scheme off the island. You may remember earlier this month when local reporters exposed SPLC for paying off teachers to attend their weekend workshop on a far-Left curriculum called Teaching Tolerance.“ Chock-full of pro-homosexual propaganda, the program aims to infiltrate the classroom with its controversial messages of sexual extremism and so-called "anti-bias” talking points. To entice teachers to actually utilize their materials with kids, SPLC offered another kickback – worth $250 – if those educators created lesson plans and agreed to be observed implementing one.
To McDermott, the whole ploy stank of foul play. Paying for special access to students isn’t ethical – particularly when the organization writing the checks has been linked in federal court to the first-ever act of D.C. domestic terrorism. If anyone needs to be taught tolerance, it’s a group whose definition of “political neutrality” is the kind of radical liberalism that inspires shooters like Floyd Corkins. After filing a complaint with the Department of Education, confident of his cause, McDermott is taking things a step further by challenging SPLC on their own turf.
While Hawaii sorts out the local pay-to-play scheme, McDermott is asking the Alabama State Bar Disciplinary Commission to investigate SPLC’s top executives. This way, the Hawaiian leader can fight the agenda on both fronts – in his state and at the group’s Montgomery headquarters. If he succeeds, the implications for every state struggling with SPLC’s influence would be profound.
As Bob told us when he stopped by “Washington Watch,” “The agenda of the Left is becoming very clear to me, as they just call us names, ‘bigots,’ ‘haters,’ and ‘homophobes,’ and they never discuss the merits of our argument. They shout us down. Well, I’m an old Marine, and they aren’t going to shout me down.” Semper Fi!
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.