Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts: I Agree With Senator Obama

By Congressman Joe Pitts

Parts of the federal government are shut today, because the House and Senate can’t agree on a spending plan. Democrats are unwilling to delay or even improve Obamacare and Republicans are unwilling to shrug our shoulders as the law continues to hurt people. We have retreated significantly from our initial desire to defund Obamacare. Now we are proposing that we keep the government open and just delay the provision that punishes people for not signing up. We think that’s reasonable.

The Obama Administration has also asked Congress to increase the $16.7 trillion credit limit on Uncle Sam’s credit card by October 17. Republicans don’t want to do it without a bipartisan commitment to make the government stop borrowing so much.

Congress is squabbling like kindergarteners.  But the stakes are big. To understand why, I want to remind readers about how we got here.

The Affordable Care Act was jammed through congress in 2010 in the most aggressively partisan act of brute force in modern legislative history.  Every Republican and most moderate Democrats voted against it. Washington lobbyists reported being told, “either you’re at the table or you’re on the menu.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed.” Even White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel begged the president to scale the bill down, but was rebuffed.

The result was fury. The Tea Party movement was born. The Democrats lost their House majority. The laws of political physics broke when Massachusetts elected a Republican senator. Three years later, America still doesn’t like the law.

Obamacare helps people who couldn’t previously get insurance. That’s a good thing. But it does so by hurting everyone else. There are better ways to care for people. You can read more about my own ideas at www.pitts.house.gov/issues.

The law will spend $2.6 trillion over the next ten years. We can’t afford that. We are already borrowing nearly 40 cents of every dollar the government spends. We are borrowing $1 trillion every year. We have $200 trillion in future spending commitments with no plan to pay for them. This is dangerous, foolish, and unsustainable.

President Obama knew this when he took office. But he punted. He appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission to study the issue until after the 2010 election. Then he ignored their suggestions. In 2011, Congress consequently refused to allow more debt without a plan to rein in borrowing. This resulted in the “Supercommittee” which was tasked with coming up with a sustainable spending plan.  If they failed, automatic spending cuts — “sequestration” — were to take effect.  They failed, and sequestration happened.  But federal spending is increasing so quickly that even sequestration failed to result in a net reduction in federal outlays.

Five years into his Presidency, Barack Obama has yet to propose a plan to achieve a balanced budget — or even sustainable levels of debt. Time is running out and he has made no effort to lead. 

This is strange for a man who, as a senator, sharply criticized Congress for raising the debt limit. In 2007, Senator Obama complained, “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is ‘trillion’ with a ‘T.’ That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers.”

He continued, “This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.”

President Obama speaks very differently these days, even though our debt has doubled under his watch. He has also changed his tune on healthcare policy. In 2008, he sharply criticized Hillary Clinton for proposing an individual insurance mandate.  Now it is the cornerstone of “Obamacare.”

Republicans disagree with President Obama on the debt ceiling and the individual mandate. But we agree completely with Senator Obama. If he agreed with us so recently on these two things, surely there’s room to find common ground now.

Rep. Joe Pitts is a Republican who represents Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District.