CTRA calls for opposition to Senate healthcare bill

The Central Texas Republican Assembly
November 22, 2009

For Immediate Release
Contact Tim Bradberry
512-507-2823
dadofping@sbcglobal.net

(Travis County, Texas) – Saturday night, the United States Senate voted 60-39 to keep its ill-conceived and largely unpopular health care bill alive in the face of growing opposition by voters around the country, especially voters in states like Arkansas who oppose the bill 64% to 28% (Zobgy). Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln (D) defied the wishes of the 64% of her fellow Arkansans who oppose the bill and voted with Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and the other 56 Democrats and 2 “Independents”, including Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who has promised to filibuster the bill if the public option is not stripped out of it.

In the early afternoon, long before the 8pm (EST) vote, Matt Drudge tweeted Louisiana Purchase: $300 million for [Sen. Mary Landrieu’s] vote, a reference to what Sen. Landrieu herself boasts is not $100 million but $300 million in promised cost reductions of the bill’s higher Medicaid liability for her state, costs that one can assumed will be redistributed to the other 49 states, like so much gas tax receipts, enough to buy her vote. BayouBuss.com reported “Senator Landrieu is a major swing vote and her vote appears to be necessary for the current Senate legislation to pass.” Since the required 60 votes in favor of starting debate was exactly met, each one of the affirmative votes was a deciding vote.

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) was wheeled out to his place on the floor of the Senate just long enough to have his vote cast, no less a deciding vote than that of Sen. Landrieu. Madeline Crabb calls the continued service of Senator Byrd a “great reason for term limits” — see http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/crabb/091122.

The Central Texas Republican Assembly is opposed to the health care bill being debated in the Senate and calls upon all Americans to join hands, voices, and forces to oppose it and to make the next deciding vote effect the defeat of this freedom reducing, marriage penalizing, abortion funding, health care rationing, deficit ballooning, state budget busting, fine imposing bill with the Orwellian tile, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.