Op-Ed: GOP must prevent a lame-duck looting session

By Senators Ron Johnson, Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham

If Republicans want to win big in November, we must do more than show voters how we plan to govern in 2013. We must also demonstrate how we’re working right now to stop the last-minute spending spree the Democrats have planned for December.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wants to force a postelection lame-duck session of Congress, in which defeated politicians will no longer be accountable to voters. In that context, he will have more leverage to raise taxes and increase spending against the threat of yet another government shutdown, leaving taxpayers on the hook for more borrowing, debts and deficits.

Republicans in the House and the Senate must work together to avert a disastrous postelection looting of the taxpayer. We urge House Republicans to pass — before the August break — a responsible plan that funds the government into the next year, leaving major issues for the newly elected president and Congress.

Should Republicans fail to do this, Americans can expect another carefully choreographed crisis that will needlessly take government to the brink of a shutdown, without concern for voters, consumers and businesses that desperately need stability amid these fragile economic times.

A series of terrible events will occur at or near the year’s end if Congress does not act soon. The current tax rates are set to jump beginning next year. Medicare payments to physicians will expire. Defense spending will be gutted. The government is also likely to reach the debt ceiling again.

Despite this coming “fiscal cliff,” Congress will take its monthlong break in August. The delay is deliberate. History shows that by waiting until the last minute, creating an atmosphere of confusion, fear and alarm, proponents of big government give themselves a much better shot at getting what they want. Lame-duck sessions have been used in the past to ram through gas tax hikes, congressional pay raises, debt limit increases, thousands of wasteful earmarks and trillions of dollars in new spending.

When Congress returns the second week of September, there will only be three short weeks until the next government shutdown. That’s due to Reid’s refusal to pass a budget in the last three years and his failure this year to pass a single government funding bill.

In these moments of planned chaos, Reid will do all he can to divide Republicans and depress their supporters over matters of taxes and spending. But we know his primary goal is to force Republicans into accepting a stopgap, temporary, two-month government spending bill, called a continuing resolution. If he accomplishes this, Congress will be forced to reconvene for a lame-duck session in late November or December to complete its work for the year.

That’s when the real mischief can begin.

During that time, under the gloomy cloud of yet another government shutdown, members of Congress who lose in the 2012 elections can freely vote to raise taxes, increase spending, pass international treaties, increase the debt limit and gut national defense. They will never have to answer to voters again.

These important issues should not be decided in panicked moments. And it would be a complete disservice to the public if we chose to let an old Congress, completely unaccountable to voters, determine the major issues of our day.

We cannot give Reid this chance. Let us repeat: House Republicans need to pass the plan to keep the government funded through 2013 before the August recess.

Republicans should use the August recess to discuss their plan to keep the government running until next year. Senate Republicans can then force a vote on the House-passed government funding legislation. This will make it very difficult for Reid and President Obama to make an honest case that Republicans are threatening to shut down the government.

Responsible leadership never would have created this mess, but we need responsible leadership to get us out of it. If Republicans don’t take bold action today to save our nation from fiscal collapse, there is little reason for voters to believe we ever will.

Sens. Jim DeMint, R, and Lindsey Graham, R, represent South Carolina. Sen. Ron Johnson, R, represents Wisconsin.

Published by The Washington Examiner.

Op-Ed: ObamaCare’s Costs Are Soaring

We already know the rosy budget estimates used to sell the law were wrong.
By RON JOHNSON

One year after the passage of ObamaCare, this paper published an op-ed I wrote (“ObamaCare and Carey’s Heart”) about how America’s health-care system saved my daughter’s life, and describing how implementing this law will limit innovation, lead to rationing, and lower the quality of care. Now, two years out, I would like to focus on the budgetary disaster.

As a candidate, Barack Obama repeatedly claimed that his health-care plan would lower annual family health-insurance premiums by $2,500 before the end of his first term as president. But the Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported that the average family premium has increased $2,200 since the start of this administration.

Then there is the higher cost to taxpayers. The CBO’s initial estimate in March 2010 of ObamaCare’s budget impact showed it saving money, reducing the federal deficit by $143 billion in the first 10 years. But that positive estimate was largely the product of gimmicks inserted into the bill by Democratic leaders to hide the law’s true cost.

Sure enough, the administration last October announced it would not implement one of those gimmicks, a long-term care program called the Class Act, because it was financially unworkable. The loss of the premiums that would be collected to finance the Class Act wiped out $70 billion of the supposed deficit reduction projected by CBO. And last month the administration’s proposed fiscal 2013 budget included $111 billion in additional spending for the premium subsidies in the health law’s insurance exchanges—further eroding any confidence in the original ObamaCare projections.

This would not be the first time a government program exceeded its projected cost. When Medicare was passed in 1965, for example, the federal government estimated it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Medicare actually cost $110 billion in 1990.

In the case of ObamaCare, one of the principal sources of the lowball estimate used to justify the law is related to the insurance exchanges. The CBO originally estimated that one million Americans would lose their employer-sponsored care and be forced into the exchanges.

But a McKinsey & Co. study in June 2011 showed that 30%-50% of employers plan to stop offering health insurance to their employees once the health law is implemented in 2014. Last week the CBO breezily dismissed this and other studies on the ground that “it is doubtful that any survey conducted today could provide very accurate predictions of employers’ future decisions.”

As someone who purchased group health insurance for over 31 years, I fully understand why the McKinsey study is more credible than the CBO.

Why? Because the decision employers face under ObamaCare is straightforward: Do they pay $20,000 per year for family coverage, or do they pay the $2,000 penalty to the government?

It is not as if dropping health coverage will expose their employees to financial risk. They will thereby make employees eligible for huge subsidies in the health-care exchanges—$10,000 if their household income is $64,000 per year. In a competitive environment, ObamaCare provides the incentive for employers to drop coverage.

According to the CBO, 154 million Americans are covered under employer-sponsored plans. What would be the cost to taxpayers if 50% of those individuals lost their coverage and became eligible for subsidies? The answer is difficult to calculate, but CBO’s answer is basically: Don’t worry, revenues will increase automatically to cover those costs (for example, employees’ taxable incomes will increase when they lose employer-provided coverage).

In reality, as government assumes a greater share of health-care costs, pressure to cut payments to providers will be enormous. Reduced government reimbursements to providers will cause massive cost-shifting to those remaining in the private health-insurance market. More employees will lose coverage. Before long, we will have what the left has long sought—a single payer health-care system modeled after Medicaid.

In recent testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told me that America’s health insurance system is in a “death spiral.” She failed to acknowledge that implementation of ObamaCare will be the cause of that death spiral, and American taxpayers will be left to pick up the tab.

In a June 2009 speech to the American Medical Association, Mr. Obama promised: “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” I’m not sure what you would call that statement, but whatever you call it, it was a doozy.

Mr. Johnson, a Republican, is a senator from Wisconsin.

Published in Wall Street Journal.

Townhall.com: President Obama’s Budget and Good Faith Negotiations

Kevin Glass, Managing Director

Guy covered most of the president’s budget earlier today, but something that’s important to emphasize over and over is this: Obama does not and never had the desire to pass this budget.

This budget is a political document that likely won’t be treated seriously even by the Democrats on Capitol Hill. I chatted with Senator Ron Johnson at CPAC, and he reminds us that Obama’s last budget lost 97-0 in the Senate. Sen. Johnson also outlined why he doesn’t think the President is negotiating in good faith with Republicans, and which Democrats it might be possible to work across the aisle with.

Even the liberal Talking Points Memo admits that this is just a wish list of goodies for Obama to shore up his liberal base supporters:

Though required by law, White House budgets are largely political documents that tend to become more and more political as reelection time gets closer and closer.

This year’s will technically be no different — but the long-term stakes will be much higher than they usually are and clarifying that fact for voters will be key to President Obama’s appeal in 2012.

This article was published on Townhall.com.

Free Enterprise: Sen. Ron Johnson: Debt and Regulations Are Keeping Economy Down

By Sean Hackbarth

I’m at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, over the next few days focusing on what policymakers and analysts are saying about the economy and what can be done to grow it faster.

I got a chance to ask Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a freshman senator and business owner, about what he thinks is keeping small businesses from growing and creating jobs. The answer was fears about the deficit and the regulatory environment.

On Washington’s fiscal crisis he said, “Not addressing the debt and deficit issue is a serious matter… that scares business owners and people who invest in businesses and consumers.” He continued, “A high level of uncertainty, the lack of confidence is really keeping the economy down.”

On regulations, he mentioned a Small Business Administration study showing that regulations cost small businesses $1.75 trillion annually. “Since 2008, they’ve [administration] added 11,000 new rules and regulations,” said Johnson, and they haven’t stopped. He named Boiler MACT and Utility MACT as two specific regulations in the pipeline that add to the uncertain economic environment.

Click here for the audio clip of Sen. Johnson.

This article was published on FreeEnterprise.com.

The Hill: Sen. Johnson: Obama ‘not someone we can compromise with’

By Josiah Ryan

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) on Thursday, proclaimed that under the Obama presidency the United States had reached a low level of socialism.

The freshman senator, who was speaking to a group of conservaties in Washington,  explained that U.S. federal spending was nearing levels seen in countries whose economies are on the brinkg – like Greece and Italy.

“Congratulations America! We have arrived at the lower level of European socialism!” he said, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Friday.

“President Obama is not someone we can compromise with,” he continued, speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC. “President Obama is someone we must defeat.”

Johnson, who is new to Washington, has made a name for himself in the 112th Congress as staunch conservative willing to wield the Senate’s procedural tools to bring to protest Democrats’ leadership of the upper chamber.

Obama is “not working with us in good faith,” said Johnson. He is “just running for re-election.”

This article was published on The Hill.

ACLJ: Senator Johnson: ObamaCare “Greatest Assault on Freedom in our Lifetimes”

By Matthew Clark

Senator Ron Johnson (WI) says that ObamaCare is the “greatest assault on freedom in our lifetimes.” In fact, it is the reason he got involved in politics in the first place.

I spoke with Senator Johnson at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, regarding ObamaCare. He is thankful for groups like the ACLJ who are actively engaged in the fight against this law at the Supreme Court.

He is “concerned” about the practical effect that ObamaCare will have on our national debt and deficit, plunging our nation down a dangerous road.

He is spearheading an effort to urge the CBO to revise its estimates on the cost of President Obama’s healthcare law. He said that if you take an honest assessment of the law, it gives employers the choice between paying upwards of $15,000 for an employee’s health insurance or pay a $2,000 fine. He noted that employers would not be leaving their employees totally in the cold, because ObamaCare creates special eligibilities for such employees.

He said that “according to employer surveys” 30 to 50 percent of employers will do the math and drop coverage for their employees. And with nearly 180 million American’s dependant on employer-provided insurance, that could leave 90 million Americans without healthcare and in need of government subsidized health insurance.

When this happens, it will cost American taxpayers, not the CBO estimated 100 billion dollars, but up to 1 trillion dollars.

Senator Johnson believes that ObamaCare was “designed to create a single payer system,” and that ObamaCare itself is just the “tip of the iceberg.”

It is not just the cost that worries the Senator, he is very “concerned” about the affect this law will have on the quality of care available to all Americans.

So what can be done about ObamaCare?

Senator Johnson believes that in addition to battling it at the Supreme Court, there are practical things that can be done in Congress and the U.S. Senate.

He told me that if Republicans win the Senate he believes that through reconciliation, which is how ObamaCare became law in the first place, and especially through the budget process, serous steps can be taken to “knock it down.”

The ACLJ is taking action as well. Just yesterday we filed our latest amicus brief with the Supreme Court representing 119 Members of Congress and over 100,000 Americans.

This article was published on the ACLJ website.