It is time for GOP to be opposition party

Dick Morris:

Only the Senate and House Republicans can save Obama now by compromising and lending his extremist legislation the veneer of bipartisanship in order to remove it as a political issue.

If the likes of GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Orrin Hatch (Utah) and others refuse to go along with Obama on healthcare and on cap-and-trade, they will force him to pass both programs as one-party bills. Not only is it possible that as public support runs out on these measures he will fail even to get 50 votes to pass them, but it is likely that even if they go through, they doom his administration to perpetual unpopularity.

Obama is, quite simply, stuck with these programs as a result of his campaign promises. But they will become larger and larger burdens to carry as their unpopularity increases.

Already, only 50 percent of voters indicate agreement with "Obama's healthcare reforms" while 45 percent register opposition. As it becomes increasingly obvious that these changes will endanger the healthcare of all Americans, the popularity of the program will fall. And once it becomes clear that the only way to fund it is to tax healthcare premiums paid by employers (after Obama specifically attacked McCain for making the same proposal), the ratings of the program - and of all who supported it - will drop even more sharply.

As Eileen McGann and I point out in our new book, Catastrophe, the correct way to expand coverage is first to increase the supply of doctors and nurses and then to ask them to treat more patients. But it stands as a simple fact that if the same number of doctors are asked to treat 50 million new patients, the quality of medical care for the rest of the population will drop.

If healthcare reform fails to pass, it will be just as destructive to Obama as the failure of HillaryCare to pass was to the Clinton administration. And if it passes, with its taxes and medical rationing, it will prove even more of a drain on his ratings. If you thought the anti-HMO reaction of the 1980s - with its move for a "patients' bill of rights" - was hot, the reaction to government rationing and to higher taxes will be even sharper.

By passing cap-and-trade, Obama will inherit the utility rate issue, long the single most potent one at the state and local level. The number of governors who have lost over utility rates (or attorneys general, like Bill Clinton, who got elected because of them) testify to the political potency of this issue. Now, with cap-and-trade, it is a federal issue Republicans can deploy to win elections.

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For those saying the Republicans are the party of no, what the Republicans are really saying no to the bad ideas that will lower our standard of living. Higher priced energy and rationed health care are not what voters want or need.

The polls are already showing that more voters believe Democrats are too liberal. The energy and health care bills are certainly good reasons for that conclusion.