Rep. Paul Ryan Leads the Republican Surrender on Repealing Health Care Reform

Well Somebody Had to Do It

It will not be characterized this way by the press or most of the right wing, but it was former Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan who ran up the white flag of surrender for the Republicans in their futile fight to delay, derail, defund and inter health care reform.

We give up

“I want to get to a budget agreement,” Mr. Ryan said bluntly on Thursday, after House Republican leaders latched onto his plan to offer a short-term increase in the debt ceiling as a way forward on deficit reduction and tax reform talks. “We think this takes us in the right direction.”

Where, you may ask, is the quest to end health care reform?  Gone baby gone.

And it is only fitting that Mr. Ryan issued his message of surrender in the right wing paper of record, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

An opinion piece he wrote in The Wall Street Journal this week laid out what has now become the House Republican plan: a debt ceiling increase tied to changes to Medicare and Medigap plans that would save more than enough money to ease some of the across-the-board cuts to domestic and defense programs; a fast track for the comprehensive simplification of the tax code; and a demand for immediate, serious and structured negotiations with the White House and Democratic Senate.

The fact that Mr. Ryan’s plan quite obviously made no mention of the health care law as a bargaining chip quickly drew him scorn from some on the right, but to Democrats and more moderate Republicans, the sidelining of the health care fight immediately gave the plan credibility.

Why did this happen?  Because the President finally got the message out that he would not move, he would not cave, he would not relent on his opposition to destroying health care reform. 

There’s a lesson here, anybody see it?