Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe predicts GOP will take over Senate

MICHAEL MCNUTT
Inhofe tells the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber that voters will sweep Republican senators into office after undergoing the “shock treatment” given the nation’s economy through policies enacted by the president and fellow Democrats.

Voters will respond to the “shock treatment” given by the president’s national economic policies by sweeping in enough Republicans in November to take over the U.S. Senate, Oklahoma’s senior U.S. senator said Thursday.

“Every institution that made America great happens to be under attack today,” U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe told members of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber during a breakfast at the Oklahoma City Marriott. “Maybe America needed a shock treatment, and we got a shock treatment. … I will predict the shock treatment will precipitate in a really great renaissance in the free enterprise system.”

Inhofe, R-Tulsa, said he expects Republicans could pick up as many as 13 seats in the Nov. 2 general elections to gain control. He listed off potential wins in Arkansas, Colorado, California, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Connecticut and Oregon. Republicans need to pick up at least 10 seats to be in the majority; 34 seats are up for election. The Senate is made up of 57 Democrats, 41 Republicans and two independents who caucus with the Democrats.

Oklahoma Democratic Party Chairman Todd Goodman, asked later to comment, said Democrats should hold onto the majority in the Senate.

“The national trend of being anti-incumbent … would tend to favor the party in the minority, but I think we’ll maintain the majority,” Goodman said. “So many of the Republicans are just battling for the fringe right. The tea party clearly is more identified with the Republican Party nationally, and I think that’s going to be a very important factor.”

Inhofe, elected in 1994 to the Senate to fill an unexpired term and re-elected three times since then, said Americans are starting to understand that policies by President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are attacking the oil, banking, insurance, health care and military industries.

“By attack, I’m talking about the government taking over,” Inhofe said. “The public never believed that we would get to the point where our government would do what government is doing today.”

The federal bailout programs that have added to the country’s deficit are having an adverse effect on the economy, he said.

“There’s no one out there who can read or write who doesn’t know you cannot sustain a deficit of one year of $1.4 trillion,” Inhofe said.

Looking to 2012

If Senate Republicans gain control, it’s likely Democrats up for re-election in 2012 will move away from supporting the president’s policies, Inhofe said.

“When the ship sinks, the rats jump off — they’re not going to go down with the ship,” he said. “We’re going to see a behavioral change in Democrats who have been following and doing everything they could to help with the administration.”

Inhofe criticized a one-year moratorium on requesting earmarks, or money for special projects, which was announced earlier this year by Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Inhofe said earmarks should be called appropriations, saying that appropriating funds is the job of Congress. He said no money is saved when a congressional earmark is removed — the money remains in the budget and is spent by bureaucrats and administration officials.

“It goes right back to the bureaucracy,” he said.

Inhofe this year requested more than $615 million in special projects, with about two-thirds of that for defense contractors and military bases.

Inhofe said he gets along with U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Muskogee, who does not request earmarks.

“When you really need something for Oklahoma, he’s there,” Inhofe said. “All I want him to agree with is just to define earmarks as appropriations, then we wouldn’t disagree on anything. If there’s a ridiculous appropriation out there, we’ll go out and fight it together.”

Inhofe said he is proud to bring federal money to pay for improvements at the state’s military installations and highway system.

Inhofe, last re-elected in 2008, said he hasn’t thought about whether he would seek another term in 2014.

“I’m 75 years old, but I still fly airplanes upside down and I don’t know why it is — I don’t hurt anywhere and I don’t feel any different than I felt five years ago,” Inhofe said. “If circumstances are the same as they are today, yeah I would be running.Read the original article NewsOK

Coburn: Our goal is to be less emotional than Rachel Maddow

AP:Senate will have to return health bill to House

WASHINGTON (AP) – Senate Republicans learned early Thursday that they will be able to kill language in a measure altering President Barack Obama’s newly enacted health care overhaul, meaning the bill will have to return to the House for final congressional approval.

It appeared initially that deleting the provisions, dealing with Pell grants for low-income students, should not cause major problems for Democrats hoping to rush the bill to Obama and avoid prolonging what has been a politically painful ordeal for the party. Democrats described the situation as a minor glitch, but did not rule out that Republicans might be able to remove additional sections of the bill.

The president, who signed the landmark legislation into law on Tuesday, was flying to Iowa later in the day for the first of many appearances he will make around the country before the fall congressional elections to sell his health care revamp.

Obama was appearing in Iowa City, where as a presidential candidate in 2007 he touted his ideas for health coverage for all. His trip comes with polls showing people are divided over the new health law, and Democratic lawmakers from competitive districts hoping he can convince more voters by November that it was the right move.

As an exhausted Senate labored past 2 a.m. on a stack of GOP amendments, Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told reporters that Republicans consulting with the chamber’s parliamentarian had found “two minor provisions” that violate Congress’ budget rules.

Republicans have been hunting for such violations in hopes of bringing down the legislation. Democrats had also been consulting with the parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, and hoped they had written a measure that would not be vulnerable to such problems.

The two provisions are expected to be formally removed from the bill on Thursday. Manley said he expected the Senate to approve the measure without them and send it to the House. He said Senate leaders, after conversations with top House Democrats, expect the House to approve the revised measure.

The Senate scheduled passage of the health bill for Thursday afternoon. Both chambers are hoping to begin a spring recess by this weekend.

Besides reshaping parts of the landmark health overhaul, the legislation transforms the federal student loan program – in which private banks distribute the money – into one in which the government issues the loans directly. That produces some federal savings, which the bill uses in part to increase Pell grants to needy students.

Democratic aides said the problematic provisions deal with protecting students from future cuts in their grants if Congress does not provide enough money for them. They violate budget rules because they do not produce savings, one aide said.

The development came as the Senate completed nine hours of uninterrupted voting on 29 GOP amendments to the legislation. Majority Democrats defeated every amendment.

The legislation would change the new health care law by making drug benefits for Medicare recipients more generous by gradually closing a gap in coverage, increasing tax subsidies to help low-income people afford health care, and boosting federal Medicaid payments to states.

It kills part of the new statute uniquely giving Nebraska extra Medicaid funds – designed to lure support from that state’s Sen. Ben Nelson – that had become a glaring embarrassment to Democrats. It also eases a new tax on expensive health coverage bitterly opposed by unions and many House Democrats, while delaying and increasing a new levy on drug makers.

As they began pushing the bill to passage on Wednesday afternoon, Democrats ran into a mountain of GOP amendments. Outnumbered and all but assured of defeat, Republicans forced votes on amendments aimed at reshaping the measure – or at least forcing Democrats to take votes that could be used against them in TV ads in the fall campaigns.

“There’s no attempt to improve the bill. There’s an attempt to destroy this bill,” said an exasperated Reid, D-Nev.

“The majority leader may not think we’re serious about changing the bill, but we’d like to change the bill, and with a little help from our friends on the other side we could improve the bill significantly,” answered Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Senators voted on 29 consecutive GOP amendments between 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and 2:30 a.m. Thursday, when they recessed.

By 57-42, Democrats rejected an amendment by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., barring federal purchases of Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs for sex offenders. Coburn said it would save millions, while Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., called it “a crass political stunt.”

Democrats also deflected GOP amendments rolling back the health law’s Medicare cuts; killing extra Medicaid funds for Tennessee and other state-specific spending; barring tax increases for families earning under $250,000; and requiring the president and other administration officials to purchase health care from exchanges the statute creates.

The landmark legislation that Obama signed Tuesday would provide health care to 32 million uninsured people, and make coverage more affordable to millions of others by expanding the reach of Medicaid and creating new subsidies. Insurance companies would be forbidden to refuse coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses, individuals could buy policies on newly created exchanges and parents could keep children on their family plans until their 26th birthdays.

The $938 billion, 10-year price tag would be financed largely by culling savings from Medicare and imposing new taxes on higher income people and the insurance, pharmaceutical and medical device industries.

Read the original article AP

Democrats to America: Drop dead

Breaking: “Fix” Bill May Not Advance In Senate

Senate Democrats Refuse Bi-partisan Meeting With Parliamentarian Until After House Votes

WASHINGTON DC – Senate Democrats have balked at a bi-partisan meeting with the Senate Parliamentarian to discuss a rule violation that could doom the entire House reconciliation proposal.

DON STEWART, McCONNELL SPOKESMAN: “Republicans have been trying to set up a meeting with Senate Democrats since yesterday to discuss this fatal point of order but have been met with nothing but silence. We suspect Democrats are slow walking us so as to have the House vote first. Since Senate Democrats refuse to meet with us and the Parliamentarian, we’ve informed our colleagues in the House that we believe the bill they’re now considering violates the clear language of Section 310g of the Congressional Budget Act, and the entire reconciliation bill is subject to a point of order and rejection in the Senate should it pass the House.”

BACKGROUND

DEMOCRAT LEADERSHIP RELEASE: “The Congressional Budget Office estimate of the health care legislation shows an increase in Social Security revenues… CBO projects that the resulting increase in wages will generate $29 billion in additional FICA contributions to the Social Security Trust Fund.” (“Health Care Reform Update,” Office of Rep. Steny Hoyer, 3/21/10)

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET ACT:  “LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any reconciliation bill or reconciliation resolution reported pursuant to a concurrent resolution on the budget agreed to under section 301 or 304, or a joint resolution pursuant to section 258C of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, or any amendment thereto or conference report thereon, that contains recommendations with respect to the old-age, survivors, and disability insurance program established under title II of the Social Security Act.” (Congressional Budget Act Of 1974, Sec. 310g, P. 31)

 Read the original article Republican.Senate.Gov

Senate passes $140 billion jobs bill

By Walter Alarkon

The Senate passed about $140 billion in extensions of expiring unemployment aid and tax provisions Wednesday, calling the package a necessary step during the economic recovery.

The bill passed on a 62-36 vote. Six Republicans joined most Democrats in backing it.

The bulk of the bill’s cost — about $80 billion — goes toward prolonging increased levels of federal unemployment aid and COBRA healthcare benefits for the jobless through the end of December.

The rest of the measure extends the current rate of Medicare payments to doctors, which is scheduled to see a 21 percent rate cut, and several tax breaks, including ones for homeowners who don’t itemize deductions, for states with sales taxes but no income tax and for companies’ research and development costs.

Democrats said the measure was just one step of their job-creation agenda aimed at reducing the 9.7 percent unemployment rate. The bill was “necessary to continue to spur economic growth and create jobs,” said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.). Unemployment benefits would provide relief to jobless Americans who would then use the aid and provide an economic boost.

Republicans who voted no said it would add more than $100 billion to the deficit, which the White House expects to hit a record $1.56 trillion this year.

“It’s the debt extender bill,” said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

The bill raises nearly $40 billion in new revenue to offset some of the cost by cutting back on a biofuel tax break used by the paper industry and by tightening tax shelter rules.

House Democrats suggested they may make changes to the Senate bill when they take it up.

Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said it’s “an open question” whether House members will force a conference to resolve differences between the Senate and House.

House members noted that the revenue raisers in the Senate bill are already included in the healthcare reform proposal favored by President Barack Obama.

 Read the original article The Hill

Hatch: Biden Gambit Will ‘Blow Up the Senate’

 [Robert Costa]

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) predicts that Democrats will use Vice President Joe Biden to thwart GOP opposition against Obamacare in the debate’s final hours. That strategy, he says, “will blow up the Senate.”

“During floor consideration of a reconciliation bill, with Biden in the chair, they will seek to bypass Republican amendments, even if the parliamentarian rules our amendments germane,” Hatch says, in an interview with National Review Online. “They want to limit debate to 20 hours, so they will use the vice president to call any amendment dilatory and overrule the parliamentarian. It would be a terrible process, and an arrogant strategy that abuses the rules and the trust of the American people. These people are so left wing, and want power so badly. If they go down that path, and pull this kind of stuff to get their way, it will blow up the Senate.”

Undeterred, Hatch says that Senate Republicans are already prepping to fight Democratic efforts to suppress GOP amendments. “Our conference is in the process of discussing that strategy right now,” he says. “No option will be overlooked. There is a distinct possibility that the Democrats’ very partisan exercise could shut down the Senate. Let’s face it — if they’re going to play this kind of game then we will make sure they have one heck of a rough time from this day forward. There are all kinds of ways we could shut down the Senate, and I know them all.”

When he looks across the Capitol, Hatch sees more disarray. “Nancy Pelosi does not have the votes,” he says. “She admits that she can’t solve the abortion problem. If she had even 200 or 210 votes, she’d be in the floor fight right now. You can take that to the bank.”

read the original article at National Review Online

Paul Ryan: Obamacare Will Raise Medical Costs

By: Dave Eberhart

If the Democrat-backed healthcare bills are signed into law, medical care in the United States is going to skyrocket along with the deficit, says one of the GOP’s leading experts on the subject.

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, told Newsmax.TV’s Ashley Martella that both the House and the Senate bills passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress are full of “smoke-and-mirror” regulations that will stymie hospitals and doctors’ attempts to enact cost-cutting measures.

He gives several examples:

• “This year, doctors in Medicare are going to get cut 21 percent in their fees. Everyone is trying to fix that. That’s $371 billion. What did the Democrats do — they took it out of this legislation and are moving it as a separate piece of legislation. So they have hidden $371 billion of spending right there.
• “Here is a second thing they are doing, which CBO [Congressional Budget Office] has no control over, 10 years of tax increases and Medicare cuts to pay for six years of spending. They can manipulate a score anyway they want to to make it appear as if it’s not a deficit, but if you actually take away all the smoke and mirrors, all the gimmicks, the bill from our estimation costs about $460 billion in deficits in the first 10 years and about 1.4 trillion in deficits in the second 10 years.”
• “If you use real world economics and reality-based scoring, not the spreadsheets they cooked up to manipulate a score, this thing represents a big deficit increase and it makes healthcare costs go up, not down and that is not my opinion, that’s the opinion of the chief actuary of Medicare/Medicaid,” he contends.

Ryan, the author of the House bill entitled “Roadmap for America’s Future Act of 2008,” which deals head-on with entitlement issues, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, is wary of Majority Leader Harry Reid’s potential end run to ram Obamacare through the Senate with the simple majority reconciliation tactic.

But under reconciliation, the original Senate bill would have to pass the House — a feat that Ryan doesn’t believe will happen, he told Martella.

“Once you decide to reconcile, and I’ve been told Democrats have decided to do this, they know they can pass it through the Senate, but I don’t know about the House,” he said. “By our best guess, we think they’re down anywhere from two to 10 votes in the House. So right now, they don’t have the votes to pass this through the House. Remember, it was a razor-thin majority the last time, they lost two Democrats since then and the sole Republican that had voted for it before is now opposed to.”

What’s more, he said, the president’s bill funds abortions and that means pro-life Democrats “Art Stupak and nine or 10 others are probably going to vote no against this bill. But you can never count them out. Cap-and-trade – they were down 24 votes the night before. They brought a 400-page amendment, porking the bill up, promising all these things — and they won by eight votes.

“So, you know, the speaker has shown that she’s a worthy adversary on these ideas, and she knows how to muscle these things through.”

Ryan declares that right now, Democrats don’t have the votes to jam through their government takeover of healthcare because the American people have rebelled.

One of the biggest controversies in the Democrats’ heathcare reform legislation was a half-trillion-dollar cut in Medicare benefits. Ryan has strong opinions on this score.

“What the Democrats are doing is taking a half-trillion dollars out of Medicare from today’s seniors, and they’re not using it to shore up Medicare, they are using it as a piggy bank to create a whole new government program — new entitlement program.

“And if you take a look at what they are doing, the sort of indiscriminate cuts to the program, according to the chief actuary in Medicare, will cause one in five providers to either go bankrupt or drop covering Medicare beneficiaries.

“It will cost 64 percent of people on Medicare Advantage to lose their plan,” Ryan said. “What I propose in my ‘Roadmap for America’s Future’ is, look, Medicare is going bankrupt; it’s got $30 trillion of unfunded liability, but if we act now, we can guarantee the program works for today’s seniors.

“So, if you’re above 55, there are no changes that occur, but below 55, we already know the program is not going to be there for us, so I reform in a way that looks like the kind of system I have as a congressman.

“I get a payment, I get to pick among a whole list of private plans that compete against each other for my business – and that’s how I get my health insurance.

“I’m proposing to do basically the same thing – the same type of plan I have in Congress for younger people under 55, with three basic changes: more assistance for people with lower incomes and with high health costs, and not as much assistance for people who are wealthy.

“If you do this, according to Medicare itself and the Congressional Budget Office, that makes the program permanently solvent, pays off that unfunded liability, and it is a key part of my plan to literally pay off our national debt.”
Ryan says that what he is proposing is the antithesis the Obama government takeover of healthcare.

“What I am proposing is a patient-centered system — a system of a healthcare market in which the individual, the patient, and doctor are the nucleus of the healthcare system, not the government.

“One of the problems we have in healthcare today is that those basic free market elements are missing in healthcare. I want to reintroduce them. What I’m saying is, number one, let’s end the tax discrimination against people in healthcare who don’t get healthcare from their jobs and equalize it so that everybody gets the same tax benefit, it is portable, and it’s attached to them instead of their job.”

Fitting under a general No. 2 are a lot of ideas, he says: “interstate shopping, more transparency in price and quality — to give individuals more power and more resources to have competition — competition among doctors, hospitals, insurers to compete against each other for the individuals business.

“A patient-centered system that involves no new taxes, doesn’t involve all this new spending we’re talking about, but takes the money we already spend on healthcare, which is already two and a half times more per person than any other country, and spends it more efficiently, more effectively by spending through the individual versus coming from the government.

On another subject, the Senate just passed a $15 billion jobs bill that Reid  drastically watered down from its original version. Newsmax asked Ryan whether it will get by the House.

“My guess is yes, they will bill passes the House,” Ryan opined. “I don’t think you’ll see Republican support for this bill — we just don’t think borrowing and spending is the key to prosperity. But the speaker has been doing a very good job at muscling the votes she needs to get the bills passed she wants to pass.

On a subject near and dear to Ryan, Newsmax asked about a ubiquitous political third rail: tax reform.

“What I am saying is, look, if you like this current tax code with all the bells and whistles loopholes and complexity that’s your choice,” Ryan said. “But if you want a very simple flat tax system that literally fits on a postcard — 10 percent on the first hundred thousand dollars for families, 25 percent above that; generous family and personal exemptions and that’s about it.

The government would get its traditional amount under the plan, which also “gets the IRS out of your affairs to give you a very simple system… A family of four earning $39,000 wouldn’t pay taxes until after that amount under this system.

“Tax reform, entitlement reform, spending cuts are actually going to help our economy — showing the world in the credit markets we are going to get our debt under control, spending under control, and releasing the entrepreneur — releasing the genius of America the risk taker the innovator by not taxing them so much is what’s going to get our economy growing again making us more competitive.

“We won’t be able to pass an agenda like that with the people running Washington right now,” he concludes.

Regarding the midterm elections in November, Ryan said, “I think there is a very realistic chance [for Republicans] to retake the House. I’ve never seen anything like this. I represent a swing district in Wisconsin, and I’ve never seen a public uprising like this ever before; it’s great to see. You know, we have a founding principle in this country which is we want government by consent of the governed.

“You’ve seen this healthcare generally run through when the public clearly is out of favor of it,” he said. “I really believe this is not a fleeting moment but a building moment.” He gives several examples:

• “This year, doctors in Medicare are going to get cut 21 percent in their fees. Everyone is trying to fix that. That’s $371 billion. What did the Democrats do — they took it out of this legislation and are moving it as a separate piece of legislation. So they have hidden $371 billion of spending right there.
• “Here is a second thing they are doing, which CBO [Congressional Budget Office] has no control over, 10 years of tax increases and Medicare cuts to pay for six years of spending. They can manipulate a score anyway they want to to make it appear as if it’s not a deficit, but if you actually take away all the smoke and mirrors, all the gimmicks, the bill from our estimation costs about $460 billion in deficits in the first 10 years and about 1.4 trillion in deficits in the second 10 years.”
• “If you use real world economics and reality-based scoring, not the spreadsheets they cooked up to manipulate a score, this thing represents a big deficit increase and it makes healthcare costs go up, not down and that is not my opinion, that’s the opinion of the chief actuary of Medicare/Medicaid,” he contends.

Ryan, the author of the House bill entitled “Roadmap for America’s Future Act of 2008,” which deals head-on with entitlement issues, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, is wary of Majority Leader Harry Reid’s potential end run to ram Obamacare through the Senate with the simple majority reconciliation tactic.

But under reconciliation, the original Senate bill would have to pass the House — a feat that Ryan doesn’t believe will happen, he told Martella.

“Once you decide to reconcile, and I’ve been told Democrats have decided to do this, they know they can pass it through the Senate, but I don’t know about the House,” he said. “By our best guess, we think they’re down anywhere from two to 10 votes in the House. So right now, they don’t have the votes to pass this through the House. Remember, it was a razor-thin majority the last time, they lost two Democrats since then and the sole Republican that had voted for it before is now opposed to.”

What’s more, he said, the president’s bill funds abortions and that means pro-life Democrats “Art Stupak and nine or 10 others are probably going to vote no against this bill. But you can never count them out. Cap-and-trade – they were down 24 votes the night before. They brought a 400-page amendment, porking the bill up, promising all these things — and they won by eight votes.

“So, you know, the speaker has shown that she’s a worthy adversary on these ideas, and she knows how to muscle these things through.”

Ryan declares that right now, Democrats don’t have the votes to jam through their government takeover of healthcare because the American people have rebelled.

One of the biggest controversies in the Democrats’ heathcare reform legislation was a half-trillion-dollar cut in Medicare benefits. Ryan has strong opinions on this score.

“What the Democrats are doing is taking a half-trillion dollars out of Medicare from today’s seniors, and they’re not using it to shore up Medicare, they are using it as a piggy bank to create a whole new government program — new entitlement program.

“And if you take a look at what they are doing, the sort of indiscriminate cuts to the program, according to the chief actuary in Medicare, will cause one in five providers to either go bankrupt or drop covering Medicare beneficiaries.

“It will cost 64 percent of people on Medicare Advantage to lose their plan,” Ryan said. “What I propose in my ‘Roadmap for America’s Future’ is, look, Medicare is going bankrupt; it’s got $30 trillion of unfunded liability, but if we act now, we can guarantee the program works for today’s seniors.

“So, if you’re above 55, there are no changes that occur, but below 55, we already know the program is not going to be there for us, so I reform in a way that looks like the kind of system I have as a congressman.

“I get a payment, I get to pick among a whole list of private plans that compete against each other for my business – and that’s how I get my health insurance.

“I’m proposing to do basically the same thing – the same type of plan I have in Congress for younger people under 55, with three basic changes: more assistance for people with lower incomes and with high health costs, and not as much assistance for people who are wealthy.

“If you do this, according to Medicare itself and the Congressional Budget Office, that makes the program permanently solvent, pays off that unfunded liability, and it is a key part of my plan to literally pay off our national debt.”
Ryan says that what he is proposing is the antithesis the Obama government takeover of healthcare.

“What I am proposing is a patient-centered system — a system of a healthcare market in which the individual, the patient, and doctor are the nucleus of the healthcare system, not the government.

“One of the problems we have in healthcare today is that those basic free market elements are missing in healthcare. I want to reintroduce them. What I’m saying is, number one, let’s end the tax discrimination against people in healthcare who don’t get healthcare from their jobs and equalize it so that everybody gets the same tax benefit, it is portable, and it’s attached to them instead of their job.”

Fitting under a general No. 2 are a lot of ideas, he says: “interstate shopping, more transparency in price and quality — to give individuals more power and more resources to have competition — competition among doctors, hospitals, insurers to compete against each other for the individuals business.

“A patient-centered system that involves no new taxes, doesn’t involve all this new spending we’re talking about, but takes the money we already spend on healthcare, which is already two and a half times more per person than any other country, and spends it more efficiently, more effectively by spending through the individual versus coming from the government.

On another subject, the Senate just passed a $15 billion jobs bill that Reid  drastically watered down from its original version. Newsmax asked Ryan whether it will get by the House.

“My guess is yes, they will bill passes the House,” Ryan opined. “I don’t think you’ll see Republican support for this bill — we just don’t think borrowing and spending is the key to prosperity. But the speaker has been doing a very good job at muscling the votes she needs to get the bills passed she wants to pass.

On a subject near and dear to Ryan, Newsmax asked about a ubiquitous political third rail: tax reform.

“What I am saying is, look, if you like this current tax code with all the bells and whistles loopholes and complexity that’s your choice,” Ryan said. “But if you want a very simple flat tax system that literally fits on a postcard — 10 percent on the first hundred thousand dollars for families, 25 percent above that; generous family and personal exemptions and that’s about it.

The government would get its traditional amount under the plan, which also “gets the IRS out of your affairs to give you a very simple system… A family of four earning $39,000 wouldn’t pay taxes until after that amount under this system.

“Tax reform, entitlement reform, spending cuts are actually going to help our economy — showing the world in the credit markets we are going to get our debt under control, spending under control, and releasing the entrepreneur — releasing the genius of America the risk taker the innovator by not taxing them so much is what’s going to get our economy growing again making us more competitive.

“We won’t be able to pass an agenda like that with the people running Washington right now,” he concludes.

Regarding the midterm elections in November, Ryan said, “I think there is a very realistic chance [for Republicans] to retake the House. I’ve never seen anything like this. I represent a swing district in Wisconsin, and I’ve never seen a public uprising like this ever before; it’s great to see. You know, we have a founding principle in this country which is we want government by consent of the governed.

“You’ve seen this healthcare generally run through when the public clearly is out of favor of it,” he said. “I really believe this is not a fleeting moment but a building moment.”

Read the original article and see video NewsMax

Sen. McConnell: Republicans May Support Jobs Bill

Andrew Taylor

WASHINGTON – The top Republican in the Senate said Sunday that GOP lawmakers “may well” vote for a jobs bill this week.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., prefers a costlier version drafted with GOP input and he didn’t commit his support to advance the legislation on Monday to a final vote this coming week.

The pending measure would provide businesses that hire the unemployed a one-year break from payroll taxes and a $1,000 tax credit if those workers stay on the job for a full year. The cost is estimated at $13 billion.

The measure would extend a tax break for small businesses buying new equipment, provide a $20 billion infusion of highway and transit money, and help states and local governments finance big public works projects.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., upset Republicans this month when he scrapped a bipartisan measure that had many more proposals that weren’t directly aimed at boosting job growth.

Reid dumped business tax breaks and other items on wish lists sought by lobbyists. But he also took out provisions to extend unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless and health insurance subsidies for the unemployed that expire on Feb. 28.

A key test vote looms Monday. It would take at least one Republican to advance Reid’s pared back bill to a final vote on Wednesday. McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said Republicans may try to slow debate down and seek to restore provisions that have been dropped, and hope the measure could advance in a few weeks.

But a Reid spokesman said Reid won’t bring back the full version negotiated between Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, which Reid criticized on a Nevada news program last week.

“The fat cats did pretty well,” Reid said last week on “Face to Face with Jon Ralston,” a Las Vegas news program.

The larger measure included about $33 billion in popular tax breaks, including an income tax deduction for sales and property taxes and a business tax credit for research and development, would be extended through 2010.

The tax breaks, more than 40 in all, expired at the end of 2009. They are routinely extended each year – the House voted to extend them in December – but the Senate never addressed them because senators were consumed by the health care debate.

Read the article CBNNews

Sheriff Arpaio Blasts McCain’s “Liberal” Policies

By Reid Wilson

Maricopa Co. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is urging GOPers to shelve Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in favor of ex-Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R), a challenger attacking from the right, in a new letter sent to primary voters.

“Senator McCain has served this country admirably but it’s time to replace his moderate or even liberal positions on taxes, the border, social causes and big bank bailouts with a consistent conservative like J.D.,” Arpaio writes in the letter. “”I just wish Senator McCain had run as hard against Barack Obama as he is against a conservative like J.D. That could have prevented the harmful, liberal agenda we are all now suffering through.”

“Indeed, Senator McCain is already attacking J.D. by name in advertisements because [McCain] knows [Hayworth] is the type of exciting, principled conservative that excites people like you and me,” Arpaio adds. “And he knows that after years of running over Republican principles his entire career no election year conversion to our way of thinking will save his campaign from voters that want conservatives to be a part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”

Arpaio sent the letter to his own fundraising network, hoping to rake in big bucks for Hayworth’s bid against McCain. Known as an anti-illegal immigration stalwart and an unorthodox sheriff who has made his prisoners live in a tent encampment and wear pink uniforms, Arpaio has a national following that could help Hayworth make up ground.

Arpaio and McCain have had their run-ins over the years, and McCain’s push for a comprehensive immigration reform system is not something Arpaio and his backers want to see.

“[W]e must stop Senator McCain’s policies to open up our borders,” Arpaio writes, citing a Heritage Foundation report that highlighted the cost of McCain’s plans. In a statement of his own, Hayworth echoed the immigration hits: “Sheriff Arpaio and I agree that John McCain’s open borders approach for America is wrong,” Hayworth said.

Hayworth is set to announce his challenge on Feb. 15.

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