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Justice

14 GOP Senators Slam Senate GOP’s ‘Unconstitutional’ Filibuster*

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 7, 2011 at 11:00 am

Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) Discuss Their Understanding Of The Constitution

Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted nearly unanimously to block Caitlan Halligan’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) broke party lines to join the 54-45 vote to allow Halligan to move forward — leaving Halligan six votes short of what she needed to break the GOP filibuster.

The Senate GOP’s decision to filibuster Halligan earned wide rebukes from Senate Republicans*, many of whom slammed this decision to filibuster a judicial nominee as unconstitutional:

  • Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
  • Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
  • Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
  • John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
  • Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
  • Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “I think filibustering judges will destroy the judiciary over time. I think it’s unconstitutional”
  • Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
  • Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): “[T]he Constitution envisions a 51-vote majority for judgeships…. [Filibustering judges] amend[s] the Constitution without going through the proper processes…. We have a majority rule that is the tradition of the Senate with judges. It is the constitutional requirement.”
  • Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “The President was elected fair and square. He has the right to submit judicial nominees and it is the Senate’s obligation under the Constitution to act on those nominees.”
  • Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”
  • Jeff Sessions (R- AL): “[The Constitution] says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote, and simply ‘shall advise and consent’ on nominations…. I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean … confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote.”
  • Richard Shelby (R-AL): “Why not allow the President to do his job of selecting judicial nominees and let us do our job in confirming or denying them? Principles of fairness call for it and the Constitution requires it.”
  • John Thune (SD): Filibustering judicial nominees “is contrary to our Constitution …. It was the Founders’ intention that the Senate dispose of them with a simple majority vote.”

*All quotes are taken from when George W. Bush was president. But, of course, that doesn’t matter because — in the words of Cornyn — “we need to treat all nominees exactly the same, regardless of whether they’re nominated by a Democrat or a Republican president.”**

**Cornyn’s statement was also made when George W. Bush was president.

Economy

GOP Voted For $50 Billion To Rebuild Iraq Without Cuts, Now Insist On Cuts To Offset Funding To Rebuild America

By Tanya Somanader on Sep 8, 2011 at 1:45 pm

Wildfire damage in Texas

The recent unprecedented onslaught of natural disasters has left already cash-strapped states with a record $36 billion in damages. Ten different natural disasters have struck in 2011. According to FEMA, damages from Hurricane Irene alone will cost at least $1.5 billion in disaster relief — and the hurricane season isn’t over.

This disastrous year is also the year that many Republican lawmakers have also decided to break precedent and demand that much-needed disaster relief be offset with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed to quickly usher $6 billion in emergency disaster relief for states through the Senate. However, even as wildfires obliterate more than 1,000 homes in his state, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) insisted that those funds be offset because “we can’t keep spending money we don’t have.” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), whose state has suffered “millions and millions of dollars” in wind and flood damage from Hurricane Irene, simply demanded that “we’ve got to offset everything“:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]

“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.”

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.

Cornyn and Burr’s position — first espoused by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) — is so callously out of touch that even fellow Republicans are slamming the idea. After enduring serious bipartisan backlash, Cantor is now gun-shy. Calling Reid’s emergency funds bill “unprecedented,” he is not clearly taking a stand against it.

NEWS FLASH

Cornyn: ‘We Owe It To The Office Of The Presidency’ To Attend Jobs Speech | President Obama will deliver his much-anticipated jobs speech tonight to a joint session of Congress, but a number GOP lawmakers will not be there. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has led a boycott of the event because he disagrees with the medium in which Obama’s message will be delivered — he’s demanding a written text instead of a speech — and Tea Party congressmen like Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) have leveraged the snub into cable news interviews. But asked about the truants this morning on Fox News, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said, “We owe it to the office of the presidency to listen to his views.” Watch it:

Update

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is encouraging members not to boycott Obama’s speech, saying, “we ought to be respectful and we ought to welcome him.”

Update

Rep. Thad McCotter (R-MI), who is running for president, told the Daily Caller that he’ll be at the speech, explaining, “That’s my job.”

NEWS FLASH

Sen. John Cornyn: 2 + 2 = 0 | As congressional Republicans continue to hold the economy hostage to their ideological whims during the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations, one GOP senator betrayed just how weak his understanding of the situation — and basic arithmetic — is. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tweeted and posted on his Facebook page this message: “Raising $2 trillion in taxes in exchange for $2 trillion in budget cuts nets zero in terms of the size of government, unless taxes are reserved for debt reduction.” Cornyn doesn’t seem to understand that raising taxes would add to, not subtract from, the money saved by making cuts, further reducing the deficit. But by Cornyn’s logic, $2 trillion in cuts + $2 trillion in tax increases = $0. The last part of his message — “unless taxes are reserved for debt reduction” — is equally nonsensical, as the money collected from taxes isn’t separated into “pools” for different purposes. Revenue is revenue, but Cornyn is trying to suggest, as he has before, that President Obama is trying to raise taxes for the heck of it, not to pay down the deficit.

Security

Cornyn Tells Latinos To Blame Democrats For Lack Of Immigration Reform

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jan 18, 2011 at 3:45 pm

Last Friday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) addressed the 2011 Inaugural Conference of the Hispanic Leadership Network — an event that was “billed” as a forum for the 2012 Republican presidential field to speak directly to Latino voters. The main topic of Cornyn’s speech was immigration. Rather than taking responsibility for his party’s obstructionism on the issue, Cornyn proceeded to lay all of the blame for the lack of immigration reform squarely at the feet of President Obama and the Democratic Congress:

They [Democrats] have controlled Congress for four years, have occupied the White House for two years, and yet they’ve broken every promise to lead on immigration reform. During his campaign, President Obama promised both LULAC and the National Council of La Raza that immigration reform would be a top priority during his first year in office, but all that changed. [...]

I would say it’s pretty easy to see that there are not many alternatives to his [Reid] party which has cynically misled on a repeated basis the Hispanic community about their good faith in moving forward and their leadership in this important issue. [...]

You have to wonder if President Obama and Senator Reid could muster 60 votes for the health care bill, why couldn’t they show similar leadership and muster support to move an immigration reform bill. One that I believe would be supported on a bipartisan basis.

Watch it:

During his speech, Cornyn additionally accused Democrats of “poison[ing] the well” with the passage of the stimulus and “Obamacare.” Yet, he acknowledged the need for a “credible and compassionate solution” that addresses the situation of the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. According to Cornyn — who co-sponsored an immigration reform bill in 2007 — he will continue to work on the issue. “One thing I assure you that hasn’t changed is my own commitment to help fix our broken immigration system,” said Cornyn.

Cornyn presented Latinos with a pretty distorted perspective of what has happened over the past several years with immigration. While it’s true that Obama over-promised and under-delivered on immigration, I’ve repeatedly argued that pinning too much blame on Democrats fails to capture the political limitations the Obama administration has faced and distracts attention from the real culprits of the immigration debate.

From the time he took office, Obama always qualified his “promise” by noting that immigration reform stood in line behind health care reform, energy legislation, and financial regulatory changes. Republicans, meanwhile, have pulled every to stunt to block — or at the very least delay — the entire progressive agenda. Following the passage of health care reform, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — the only Republican who was open to co-sponsoring an immigration bill — simply decided to pull out, similarly stating that the “well has been poisoned.” Republicans continued to rail on immigration reform and trumpeted border security and overturning the 14th amendment to deny the American-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship. In December, Republicans blocked the DREAM Act. If Republicans couldn’t accept a bill which would help undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents, it’s hard to imagine they’d be open to anything more ambitious.

Cornyn should know all of this because he was at the center of the debate last year. For a while, immigration advocates and Democratic leadership seemed to be lobbying Cornyn in hopes that he would join Graham as a second Republican co-sponsor. Ultimately, Cornyn backed away, accused Democrats of playing politics with immigration, and decided his party should single-mindedly focus on securing the border.

Cornyn is no stranger to pandering on immigration. Back in 2006, he received a lot of flack for speaking at a conference entitled “Defending the Homeland: America’s Immigration Crisis.” The event was hosted by the Rockford Institute — an organization described as “xenophobic, racist, and nativist” by its own ex-director. The conference was moderated by the group’s current president, Thomas Fleming, who once wrote, “Whatever we may say in public, most of us do not much like Mexicans, whom we regard as too irrational, too violent, too passionate.”

Politics

ANALYSIS: A Look At Republicans Who Are Blasting An Omnibus Bill Laden With Their Own Pork

By George Zornick on Dec 16, 2010 at 2:45 pm

As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell requested and received millions of dollars in earmarks for this year’s omnibus spending bill, but has now denounced the measure and plans to vote against it. Overall, Republican Senators have gotten nearly $2 billion in earmarks into the omnibus, and yet because of concerns over “wasteful spending,” they are threatening to block the entire bill — which contains not only funding for their own projects, but the money the federal government needs to operate past this weekend.

Yesterday, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and John Thune (R-SD) denounced earmarks and the omnibus bill during a press conference, despite requesting hundreds of millions of dollars of earmarks between them. “I support those projects, but I don’t support this bill,” reasoned Thune. Cornyn defended himself in a “heated exchange” with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

Today, the Washington Post reports that two of the most prolific earmarkers in Congress — “unabashed spending barons” Republican Sens. Roger Wicker and Thad Cochran of Mississippi — are also planning to vote against the omnibus, despite being responsible for 405 earmarks costing over $865 million.

Sens. McConnell, Wicker, Cochran, Cornyn and Thune are far from the only earmark hypocrites, however. A large number of Republicans requested substantial earmarks for the 2011 omnibus, despite a history of demagoguing the earmark process, and also plan to vote against a bill that included many of their requests. An examination of Taxpayers for Common Sense’s database of earmark requests for this year’s omnibus and their database of who was awarded earmarks last year, along with Sen. Tom Coburn’s working database of the earmarks that actually made it into this year’s omnibus, reveal quite a bit of Republican hypocrisy:

– Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) said on Fox News’ “Happening Now” this morning that he would vote against the omnibus bill. He requested 291 earmarks totaling over $770.5 million, and succeeded in getting 86 earmarks into the omnibus.

– Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is opposing the omnibus because it’s “full of unnecessary spending which grows the federal government.” He requested 116 earmarks costing $326.8 million, and the omnibus contains one of these for $379,000.

– Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s (R-TX) office said she will vote against the omnibus, which she tried to insert 119 earmarks into, at a cost of $770.9 million. She has $140 million earmarked in the bill.

– Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) will also oppose the omnibus, because it “simply spends too much.” Chambliss requested 122 earmarks totaling $492 million. He achieved $56 million in earmarks in the omnibus.

– Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) blasted the “massive, 2,000 page spending bill” in a statement. Burr tried for 82 earmarks, totaling $287.1 million, and received most of them.

– Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) “has been railing against the spending in that massive bill that could come to a vote before the lame duck session.” He requested 32 earmarks this year, totaling $115.8 million, and got nearly all of them — almost $100 million — into the omnibus.

– Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) tweeted today that “Defending the #earmark establishment is not leadership. Defending business-as-usual in Washington isn’t either. Leaders lead by example.” Rehberg is a proud member of the “earmark establishment” — last year he was the fifth-largest earmarker in the House, with 89 earmarks in the 2010 omnibus totaling $103.5 million.

– Rep. Chris Lee (R-NY) said on Fox Business Channel this morning that “It’s a week before Christmas, and unfortunately my Democratic colleagues like to play Santa Claus to the tune of $8 billion in new earmarks.” Lee was in a much more festive mood last year, with 36 earmarks totaling over $33.3 million in the 2010 omnibus.

– Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) tweeted today that “A HUGE spending bill is making its way through Congress. $1.1 trillion and 6,000 earmarks. We must stop it. I encourage the President to veto.” Last year, however, Wilson got 15 earmarks costing over $23.3 million in the 2010 omnibus.

It is the height of hypocrisy for these Republicans — all of whom have a long history of earmarking, and in most cases requested and received earmarks in this very bill — to suddenly oppose it because of a newly found opposition to “wasteful” spending.

Politics

While Attacking Omnibus For Earmarks, McConnell And Senate GOP Asked For Billions For Themselves

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Dec 15, 2010 at 1:41 pm

Republican lawmakers and candidates have spent the past year railing against congressional earmarks as the embodiment of everything wrong with “business as usual in Washington.” And under heavy pressure from the tea party movement, they approved earmark bans for GOP members in the House and Senate last month.

Yesterday, the Senate unveiled an omnibus appropriations bill to fund the government. Senate Republicans immediately attacked the bill en masse for containing billions in earmarks, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) calling the spending provisions “completely and totally inappropriate” and saying he is “actively working to defeat” the bill. “This nearly 2,000-page omnibus filled with thousands of earmarks,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) said, shows that “President Obama and Democrats have apparently learned nothing from this November’s election.”

Yet, the same may be said about congressional Republicans, who themselves requested over $2 billion in the earmarks attached the omnibus, including millions from McConnell himself:

Earlier this year, McConnell asked for $4 million for marijuana eradication efforts by the Kentucky National Guard; $1 million for construction of the Kentucky Blood Center Building; and $650,000 for Advanced Genetic Technologies, a DNA research center at the University of Kentucky.

Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “has a $379,000 earmark to study port dredging in Charleston, something he considers key to economic development.” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) championed an earmark that would prevent the state of Texas from converting existing interstate highway lanes into toll roads. And Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) requested over $16 million in defense-related earmarks.

Appearing on Fox News this morning, Cornyn attacked the omnibus bill for containing earmarks, but host Bill Hemmer confronted Cornyn with his own $16 million request. At first, the senator fumbled and tried to change the subject, but after being pressed, Cornyn defended the merits of his earmarks but not the process, before finally trying to exculpate himself by saying he requested the money “earlier on in the year”:

HEMMER: You yourself has asked for earmarks too. … Can you defend that senator?

CORNYN: Well, I believe I can. But I’m not going to. Because I’m going to vote against this bill. … I think we need an earmark moratorium, which I voted for two years, till we fix this broken system, because it’s become a symbol of wasteful Washington spending.

HEMMER: I get it, but I’m confused then, then why is there $16 million in requests from you? Is that not true?

CORNYN: Earlier on in the year, I did request earmarks that I think are individually defensible. And if we had a debate on the floor, I think I could show how they help our men and women in uniform fight two different wars.

Watch it:

Of course, Cornyn is right to argue that many earmarks have merit and provide necessary funds for important projects in lawmakers’ districts. For this reason, Democrats and a handful of dissenting Republicans rebuffed efforts to impose a binding earmark ban in the Senate last month. Moreover, as retiring Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) said, “We’re fooling the American people when we tell them the problem [with the deficit] is earmarks.”

But if Cornyn and his colleagues are going to pander to the tea party movement and demonize earmarks, they should at least practice what they preach. But so far, they have not. Just three days after the Senate GOP voted to enact their earmark ban, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the number two Senate Republican, “got himself a whopping $200 million” earmark for his state. Meanwhile, the group of House Republicans most closely aligned with the tea party, those in the Tea Party Caucus, have taken over $1 billion in earmarks over the past year.

Politics

After Filibustering The Seating Of Franken, Cornyn Insists Alaskans ‘Deserve’ Senate Representation

By Lee Fang on Dec 10, 2010 at 12:40 pm

In 2009, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) proclaimed that he would do everything possible to block Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) from taking his seat in the Senate, even though Franken led his Republican opponent Norm Coleman in the vote tally. Declaring that he would fight “World War III” to keep Franken out of the Senate for “years,” Cornyn reasoned that allowing Coleman’s legal challenges to Franken were more important than providing Minnesota with a senator. However, with Republican Joe Miller challenging the ballots in his election with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Cornyn is singing a different tune.

Roll Call reports that Cornyn is demanding that Alaskans simply deserve full representation, and is hoping the legal challenges regarding the 2010 Alaska senate election do not deprive the state of its senator when Congress convenes in January:

An Alaska state court judge is expected to make a ruling on the Senate race by Friday, but with an appeal to the state Supreme Court likely, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn said he hopes the court process concludes soon. As we’ve reported, the ongoing battle has put Republicans on Capitol Hill in a tough spot. The Texan addressed that concern Wednesday in an interview with Roll Call. “We just have to be patient and wait for the judge to decide,” said Cornyn, a former judge. “I understand that could be as early as [Thursday], and I hope it doesn’t go on much longer because I think the people of Alaska deserve to have a Senator when we reconvene again in January, and not still have that up in the air.”

When it comes to a Republican senator, Cornyn urgently believes that Alaska (population 698,473) deserves full representation in Congress. However, he was more than happy to deprive 5,266,214 Minnesotans a vote in the senate because of partisan reasons. Cornyn prevented Franken from taking his seat using the threat of a filibuster. Cornyn’s National Republican Campaign Committee also provided lawyers for Coleman to keep Franken out of the Senate for six months.

Politics

Cornyn Refuses To Denounce Vitter’s Race-Baiting Anti-Immigrant Campaign Ad

By George Zornick on Oct 31, 2010 at 12:23 pm

This month, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) began airing a race-baiting anti-immigrant campaign ad that the local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce found to be “totally abhorrent and shocking.” The ad targets the immigration stance of Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA), Vitter’s opponent: the narrator says “Thanks to him, we may as well put out a welcome sign for illegal aliens,” as footage of dirty, goofy-looking Latino men slipping through a hole in a fence displaying a neon welcome sign runs across the screen. The men step into a limo with a giant government check they defiantly hang out the window as they zoom away. “I’m going to use the ‘R’ word and say racist,” said the spokeswoman for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “We are saying you owe us an apology, we are offended, we expect an immediate apology and we expect this ad to be yanked from the airwaves immediately,” she continued.

Not only did Vitter continue to run the ad, but he defended it during a debate last week, asking “Is it a stereotype that folks coming across the border — that is a problem and they look like that? Dennis that is a fact, that is not a stereotype! Let’s get our heads out of the sand!” This morning on ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, joined Vitter in defending the ad. Amanpour repeatedly invited Cornyn to denounce the ad’s racial overtones, which he refused to do, saying only it was “appropriate” to raise the issue of illegal immigration:

AMANPOUR: Some people have called that [ad] racist. I want to know, do you think it’s appropriate to finger Hispanics in that way? Do you think it’s appropriate?

CORNYN: I wish we had time to show Melancon’s ads against Vitter. They’re pretty tough.

AMANPOUR: But let me just ask about this particular ad —

CORNYN: I think border security is a federal responsibility and one that the federal government has simply failed to deal with in an appropriate way. And I think it’s appropriate to raise that issue in the campaign.

AMANPOUR: But do you think it’s appropriate in this way? I mean you’re from Texas. You have a big Hispanic group there. Do you think it’s appropriate? Would you have done that?

CORNYN: I didn’t write the ad.

AMANPOUR: Would you have done it?

CORNYN: I think calling attention to illegal immigration is — for example, this last year, Christiane, 45,000 people immigrated to the United States from countries other than Mexico, including counting like Yemen where this bomb emanated from. It’s a national security issue.

Watch it:

Last year, Cornyn hit back against race-based attacks on then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, saying that Newt Gingrich’s allegations that Sotomayor was prejudiced against non-Hispanics were “terrible,” and “not the kind of tone any of us want to set.” By refusing to denounce Vitter’s ad, and even suggesting it’s “appropriate,” Cornyn has apparently revised his opinion of what is an appropriate tone.

Health

Sen. Cornyn: Insurers Should Still Deny Coverage To Those With Pre-Existing Conditions

By Igor Volsky on Oct 22, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

This week, after several Republicans suggested that the GOP would only repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, Republican senators sought to reassure their conservative constituency of the purity of their intent by reiterating their opposition to the entire health care law. “Let me be very clear,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “The position of the Republican Senators, all of us, is to repeal Obamacare if we can. If we can’t, having tried to do so, we will do everything we can to defund all or parts of it, to shave parts of it off … to try to reduce the scope of the rules and regulations.”

But Republicans also say that they support some parts of the health care law — like the consumer protections that would prohibit insurers from denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions. Those elements would help consumers but they’d be better off if Obamacare were repealed and replaced with similar provisions. As Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) explained during his debate in North Carolina last night, “Those provisions are acceptable to me and most Republicans and most Americans,” he said. “I think it’s important to realize we could have the elimination of pre-existing conditions tomorrow. We could have the elimination of lifetime caps tomorrow. We could begin to close the doughnut hole tomorrow. But you can’t fix the current health care bill that the president passed.”

So would Republicans really adopt strong consumer protections? It’s unlikely. The House Republicans’ ‘Pledge,’ for instance, guarantees coverage regardless of pre-existing condition only to those beneficiaries who had been previously insured. The uninsured can still be denied coverage. Similarly, a bill offered by Sens. Burr and Tom Coburn (R-OK) in May of 2009 encouraged states to “establish rational and reasonable consumer protections,” but did not eliminate the practice of denying coverage nationwide. Throw into this mix yesterday’s comments by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and you quickly get the sense that any GOP pre-existing condition provision would be limited at best:

SIEGEL: But the basic change here, the government has expanded the entitlement to health insurance. Do you hope to see that expansion undone as a matter of federal law?

CORNYN: I think the way it was done is problematic because it imposes a fine on individuals who don’t carry health insurance, but it says, on the other hand, that if you get sick, that an insurance company must issue you a policy regardless of your preexisting conditions and the like, which is driving up the cost of insurance. I think the model, to me, the ideal model is one that we’ve seen used in companies like Whole Foods Company in Austin, Texas, using health savings accounts.

Cornyn, of course, has it backwards. You can’t require insurance companies to “issue you a policy regardless of your preexisting conditions” unless you impose “a fine on individuals who don’t carry health insurance.” If you don’t find a way to encourage people who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with health insurance to buy coverage, you can’t eliminate the pre-existing condition denials. That’s because without a mandate that brings healthy people into the program, the provision requires insurers to accept individuals who waited too long to purchase coverage. These sicker applicants would use up a lot of health care and drive up costs for everyone else in the pool, pushing out younger and healthier applicants (and their premium dollars). Only sick people who desperately need coverage would remain in the plan and as Kentucky, Main, New Hampshire, New Jersey and many other states have all found out, that’s a prescription for failure.

So the larger point here is that no matter what Republicans tell you about pre-existing conditions, without a mandate, they can’t possibly replace the existing consumer protections. All they can offer is some inferior provision that look a lot like the existing HIPAA law and won’t do much for the uninsured.

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