RepubliCare (With Update)

There is a lot of stuff coming out on how much of the recently-passed health care reform bill was really just a long list of ideas that Republicans had previously embraced. It's been fairly clear to me for quite some time that the HCR bill was mostly populated with Republican ideas, but neither the left or the right seemed to want to talk about this issue.

And for good reason: The GOP was simply out to "break" Obama no matter how many Republican ideas he embraced, and the Democrats certainly didn't want to point out that the reform package was pretty much based on ideas originally proposed by conservatives (their base wouldn't have liked that at all).

But now that health care reform is the law of the land, this story is starting to gather steam. Yesterday, we learned that Bush speechwriter David Frum, who was recently fired by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), made the following comment to fellow conservative Bruce Bartlett:

Since, [Frum] is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

Imagine that – a conservative “think” tank muzzled because too many of its members agreed with the President on how to solve one of the critical problems of our time. And the other side calls us Stalinists?

I’ll give the GOP credit, though – they had so much anti-Obama solidarity on this health care reform issue that the Republicans were even able to shut down their own intellectuals. [I was about to finish that thought with “Only in America,” but that’s about as un-American as you can get].

There's more. Check out this video. If you can't get video at your workplace, what it shows is an excerpt from an interview today wherein Campbell Brown at CNN asked GOP senator Orrin Hatch why he's against health care reform now even though he actually supported an individual mandate back in 1993. Hatch's response:

"In 1993, we were trying to kill HillaryCare, and I didn't pay any attention to [the individual mandate], because that was a part of a bill I just hadn't centered on, but since then, of course, 17 years later, when it comes up and I know it's possible it's going to pass, I looked at it, and constitutionally, I came to the conclusion, and everyone came to the conclusion, that this would be the first time in history that the federal government requires you to buy something you don't want."

I'm not even going to try to parse Hatch's bullshit response, because the point is that the media is finally starting to realize that "ObamaCare" is actually "RepubliCare" (or maybe we should just call it RomneyCare).

In any event, the Republicans really blew it on this issue, because all they had to do was embrace their own ideas! They could have easily claimed credit for a majority of the bill, and Obama most likely would have let them do it. Had the GOP done that, there would have been overwhelming bipartisan support for the reforms, and the signing ceremony that happened earlier in the week would have been a great day for all Americans as opposed to what it turned out to be, namely, a huge, momentum-building victory for Obama and the Democrats, and a call to violence for the radical right.

But my question is: What now? I expect that the media will come out with more reporting over the following weeks pointing out just how much health care reform is based on GOP ideas. If this happens, what will be the GOP response? Will Republicans just continue to deny the obvious, or will they be forced to pivot on this issue and embrace the reform? How can the Republicans embrace reform now after spending all that effort enraging their lunatic base?

As I mentioned on Wednesday, GOP Senator Chuck Grassley has already taken credit for some of the HCR law, and I expect we'll see more of this over the next few weeks. But the bottom line here is that the Republicans really backed themselves into a corner on this issue.

UPDATE: Here is what Obama said this morning on Today:

"[W]hen you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said, you know, this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican Governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts."

More on this here.