If you thought cats had a lot of lives, you should see the GOP health care repeal. Every time the effort seems doomed, Republicans manage to paddle it back to life — as if they’re as desperate to save their majority as they are to stop the hemorrhaging of our health care system. Monday, Democrats didn’t even go to the trouble of pronouncing the bill dead when Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) decided to tank the latest vote.

As if rolling back a $3 trillion law isn’t complicated enough, the members driving the effort have to deal with liberal Republicans who seem intent on making the repeal’s death an inside job. From Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) unrealistic call for regular order to Collins’s pro-abortion betrayal, leadership has its hands full. But despite the odds, no one seems ready to talk about the Graham-Cassidy bill in the past tense. “My preference obviously would be to pass [Obamacare repeal] this week,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told reporters. “But if that’s not the case, I agree with Senator Graham. We’re both on the Budget Committee, and we’ll insist on passing a budget that would have reconciliation instructions for both tax reform and health care reform.”

Republicans have said all along that the Sept. 30 deadline wasn’t the end of the conversation. Although they’d love to put a bow on this debate and move on to tax reform with a major victory in the bank, nothing is stopping them from resetting the clock on Obamacare. Sen. Johnson’s plan — and others’ — is to use the 2018 budget resolution to unlock the power of the reconciliation process again. That means Republicans can move forward with their measure to gut Obamacare with just 51 votes, instead of the impossible 60-vote threshold. The other option is to hitch the repeal onto the tax overhaul, which there appears to be little appetite to do.

As frustrated as voters must be, there is some comfort in the fact that conservatives refused to give in to Collins’s demands to drop the language defunding Planned Parenthood. According to Hill sources, that was the condition of her support — one, fortunately, that conservatives refused. Without the language ending America’s forced partnership between taxpayers and the abortion industry, there is no health care reform. And no pro-life support. So, in the midst of these challenges, we applaud the conservative leaders for rejecting a deal that would have done far more damage to the credibility of the GOP than another delay in the debate.

When Republicans do reboot their health care push, Sen. Graham says members will have a clear choice.

Federalism versus socialism, you decide what you want. Under Obamacare, it’s not working… So here’s what we do: we repeal the employer mandate and the individual mandate at the federal level. If you want to re-impose them at the state level, you can. If you want to go to a single-payer health care in California or Oregon, you can — you just can’t drag South Carolina with you. We take the rest of the funding for Obamacare that would’ve gone to federal bureaucrats, insurance companies, and we block-grant it back to the states over a 10-year period to achieve parity and cut spending by 2030. We give states flexibility and control over the money — and you have more voice over how your health care will be administered, because the people in charge of it, you can vote for. [Unlike] Obamacare, [where] some bureaucrats who could really not care that much about you [make the decisions]… I think it’s a very good idea. It’s called federalism.

Even more importantly, he explained on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” “We’re gonna take that money and allocate it back to the states — and the Hyde language will follow every dollar. And that’s not true of Obamacare.” In other words, every cent of his plan’s money will be subject to pro-life law. “If we fail, then it’s just a matter of time until we have Berniecare,” Graham warned. “Obamacare isn’t good enough for liberals. They want to go to Berniecare, which is socialized, 100 percent, government-run health care… Obamacare is a placeholder for Berniecare. The Graham-Cassidy bill ends the march to single-payer health care.”

Of course, he agreed, his bill isn’t perfect. Few are. But, he told me, “If we’re not for this, what are we for? To the [Democrats’] credit, they have a belief in their ideas and they’re willing to fight for them. We passed Obamacare on Christmas Eve. They used reconciliation. There isn’t anything they won’t do to get their way… We need to be as determined to repeal it as they were to replace it. We have to get the power out of Washington. If we win this fight, we change the course of spending and health care. And if we lose this fight, God help your children and grandchildren.”

Originally published here.

State Department Errs on the Genocide

It didn’t take long for the Trump administration to call ISIS’s slaughter of Christians “genocide.” But it has taken surprisingly long for it to do something about it. The White House may have changed, but the situation for thousands of persecuted men and women of faith in the Middle East hasn’t changed much. Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, writes in a column for The Wall Street Journal that Secretary Rex Tillerson’s State Department is “making the situation worse [for Christians] by continuing Obama policies that effectively exclude these non-Muslims from U.S. aid in Iraq.”

“This is really astonishing,” she points out, “because Secretary Tillerson has confirmed that these refugees face genocide.” Yet, Shea explains, most of the $250 million earmarked in reconstruction projects “such as restoring water and power” have barely gotten off the ground — especially in areas dominated by Christians. Making matters worse, most of the U.S. aid flows through the UN, an Obama tradition that continues now.

“One local church authority told me the U.N. reports ‘grossly overstate the quality and substance of the actual work’ and their projects’ influence is ‘minimal or nonexistent.’ A representative from the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, a unified church group, told me earlier this month that the only major projects under way are its own,” Shea writes. As a result, “Far lower percentages of Christians and Yazidis are returning from displacement to their homes in the devastated Nineveh Plains and Sinjar, respectively, compared with the larger religious groups in Tikrit, Fallujah and Mosul.”

Over the past few months, Senators James Lankford (R-OK), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ben Sasse (R-NE), and John Cornyn (R-TX) have been making noise at the State Department, complaining that the agency isn’t doing enough to help Christians and other religious minorities. No one seems to understand why the administration hasn’t spent the money that’s been earmarked — or why it insists on funneling the money through a UN that has done little to ease Christians’ plight. “The U.S. should aid them directly,” says Rev. Benedict Kiely, who helps men and women of faith on the ground in the Middle East. These are people, he points out, who didn’t go to UN camps because ISIS had infiltrated them. “All the assistance has been coming from church organizations.”

As usual, the decisions are being made by Obama holdovers, Shea warns. If President Trump would intervene, there’s plenty he could do to make sure U.S. aid is reaching Iraq’s most vulnerable. “First, he can direct his administration to address their humanitarian and stabilization needs,” Shea explains. “This should include dropping the U.N. as a pass-through for U.S. aid. He can also appoint an interagency coordinator to ensure that bureaucratic hurdles don’t interfere with getting aid to all groups. These relatively small tweaks would help preserve the region’s religious minorities.”

It’s time for the State Department to follow through on its commitment to help these families, who are being hunted down simply for believing in Jesus Christ. The least America can do is ensure that its money is not only being used but used effectively.

Originally published here.

Libs’ Interest in Ex-Im Bank Skyrockets

President Trump is still trying to fill hundreds of empty offices in his administration — and liberals have no intention of helping him. As if the confirmation process weren’t slow enough, the Left is adding to the logjam with a barrage of smear campaigns and outside attacks. And nominees like former Congressman Scott Garrett are its targets.

For months, liberal activists have been trying to sink the pro-family leader’s bid to head the Export-Import Bank, an agency President Trump wasn’t even convinced he wanted to keep. Like the EPA and IRS, the new administration has reconsidered — under the condition that a principled leader will help clean up the waste and mess left behind by eight years of Barack Obama. Scott Garrett was Donald Trump’s choice to do exactly that.

But as usual, the New Jersey leader is too conservative for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s taste. In a letter to the Senate Banking Committee that oversees his confirmation, it blasts Garrett for opposing the Ex-Im Bank when he was in Congress. “Mr. Garrett has failed to in any way publicly describe any change of heart towards Ex-Im to explain why he now wants to lead the organization that he spent so much of his career trying to shutter, nor has he committed to returning Ex-Im to a fully functional state,” wrote Senior Executive Vice President Suzanne Clark. Never mind that his objections to the bank are the very reason Trump chose him to reform it.

That doesn’t seem to matter to the chamber, which, many would agree, hasn’t represented most businesses in America for years. Instead, it’s been hijacked by radical LGBT activists, who would like nothing more than to keep conservatives like Garrett from positions of leadership. If they succeed, some warn, it will be Americans who suffer. As far as the White House is concerned, the bank is “another form of corporate welfare” and Garrett would be the first line of defense. He would “refocus Ex-Im on its original mission of providing support for the businesses that truly need it while protecting taxpayers.” Let’s hope the Senate tunes out the critics and gives him a chance to prove them wrong.

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.