After the 112th Congress was widely derided for being the least productive Congress in U.S. history, the 113th Congress didn’t waste any time in rushing to surpass the 112th in irrelevancy and misguided political stunts, as Rep. Michele Bachmann introduced a bill to repeal Obamacare — for the 34th time.
In the last two years, House Republicans 33 times introduced unsuccessful bills to repeal President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act. By one estimate, they wasted at least 88 hours of Congressional activity at a cost of $50 million — and probably greatly contributed to the 112th’s record for epic incompetence, passing just 219 bills, which was more than a hundred less than the previous Congressional record for lack of productivity.
With a Democratic majority in the Senate and President Obama clearly poised to veto any scaling back of his healthcare reform, the Obamacare repeal efforts are simply a way for conservative Republicans to pander to their base. And the pandering won’t stop with the likes of Bachmann. After Cuban-American tea party darling Ted Cruz was sworn in as the first Latino Senator in Texas history, Cruz said his first piece of legislation will be to fulfill his promise to repeal “every syllable of every word” of Obamacare.
If the satirical pop culture definition of insanity — generally attributed to Albert Einstein — is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then the Republican members of Congress should be forever locked away in mental institutions. But the only problem is that every time they take another run at Obamacare, they waste hours of time and millions of dollars of taxpayer money. And the latest action by Bachmann comes after the U.S. Supreme Court in June voted to uphold the President’s healthcare law — and after House Speaker John Boehner grudgingly conceded after Obama’s trouncing of Mitt Romney that “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
But such misguided congressional acts surely are what is behind Congress’ stunningly low approval rating of 18 percent—a rating so low that “New York Times” columnist Gail Collins wrote that the idea of a Communist takeover of America gets higher poll numbers than the U.S. Congress.
