Repealing Obamacare: Let’s Get This Done

Dec 9, 2016

Since 2010 everyone in the Republican party has agreed that Obamacare must be repealed. Most Republican members of Congress — ourselves included — were elected, and reelected, on the promise that we would take any opportunity possible to end this partisan, ham-handed, and unconstitutional law.

When Republicans attained control of both the House and Senate in 2015, we saw an opportunity to lay the foundation for full repeal under a possible future Republican president. To that end, we penned an article in National Review calling for Congress to send President Obama a bill repealing Obamacare. “It is more important than ever for Republicans in Congress to honor the promises we have made to the American people,” we wrote. “We can do this, before the end of the year, through a procedure known as ‘budget reconciliation.’”

House and Senate Republicans followed through on this promise. We sent a bill to President Obama’s desk that would have repealed much of the law, and was promptly — and unsurprisingly — vetoed. But this exercise was not, by any measure, a fruitless effort.

That bill, H.R. 3762, established the minimum standards against which any future Obamacare repeal bills would be measured. It zeroed out Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, scrapped the taxes, revived health savings accounts, and rolled back the Medicaid expansion and subsidies. Majorities in the House and Senate are on record voting for all of these items. We can do it again.

But there is no denying that any new reconciliation repeal bill in the next Congress will have a different outcome. This time, when the House and Senate send such a bill to the White House, the incoming president has said he will sign it. That is why it is so important that we get this repeal bill right.

And the bare minimum simply is not enough this time.

A minimum effort could end up hurting many Americans. Specifically, the law’s many insurance mandates drive up health costs and force individuals to violate their deeply held religious convictions. When government bureaucrats and politicians decide that every insurance policy must cover free doctor visits and abortifacients, Americans who don’t need those options end up paying more for products they don’t want. That’s great for the insurance companies, but not for taxpayers or consumers.

Some have argued that insurance regulations fall outside the scope of what Senate rules allow in a reconciliation bill. But since taxpayers are on the hook for billions in health insurance premiums every year, we should not give up on tackling the insurance regulations that inflate those premiums.

But deleting Obamacare from federal statute will be only the first step in reforming federal health-care policy. Republicans cannot wash their hands of the consequences of the Democrats’ failed health-care experiment. We have a responsibility to fix the broken government policies that have crippled our health-care system for decades. This means providing a transition, for however many years, for the market to recover and be able to serve individuals and businesses with more affordable, accessible health coverage. This means implementing the best of the many free-market repair proposals that Republicans have been developing for the past six years. People need options, not heavy-handed government mandates.

The details of a replacement plan do not have to be finalized now. But overall, it must honor medicine’s founding principle: primum non nocere — first, do no harm.

Congress and the Trump administration can’t afford to fumble the repeal of Obamacare.  We can’t afford to just squeak by with the bare minimum, while preserving many of Obamacare’s most burdensome and intrusive provisions.

The American people have entrusted Republicans with a historic opportunity. They gave us the House, the Senate, a majority of governor’s seats, and the White House. Now we must honor the trust they have put in us by repealing and replacing Obamacare with health-care policies that lower costs, improve quality, and increase access for all Americans.

Lee Praises Pruitt Pick for EPA

Dec 8, 2016

WASHINGTON – Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) issued the following statement Thursday in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as his nominee for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator:

Examining the Competitive Impact of the AT&T-Time Warner Transaction

Dec 7, 2016

We are living in a golden age of television. One TV writer recently wrote that for “the first time I’ve beg[un] to feel like there may, in fact, be too much good TV.”[1] From Game of Thrones to House of Cards to many other programs across networks and platforms, the quantity and quality of programming content is greater than we have ever known.

Senators Introduce the Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act of 2016

Dec 6, 2016

WASHINGTON – Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), John Hoeven (R-ND), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act, Monday, a bill that would improve the business of Congress and increase the public’s understanding of its work by establishing a structured congressional clerkship program for recent law school graduates and young lawyers.

Floor Remarks on George Will Column

Dec 6, 2016

Over the weekend, syndicated columnist George F. Will wrote about a disturbing ruling in a French court. The court ruled that a video called “Dear Future Mom” produced by the Global Down Syndrome Foundation must be banned from French television. What triggered the censorship? Inciting violence? Hate-speech? Discrimination? The opposite, as it turns out. I’ll let Mr. Will tell the story:

Conservatives Should Embrace Principled Populism

Dec 6, 2016

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” Calvin Coolidge once said. With a unified federal government soon to be in Republican hands, however, maybe we can do a bit of both.

December 5, 2016 – Mobile Office Visit to Holladay

Dec 5, 2016

Mobile Office Visit to Holladay When: Monday, December 5, 3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Where: Holladay City Hall, 4580 S 2300 E, Holladay, UT 84117

December 5, 2016 – Mobile Office Visit to Lindon

Dec 5, 2016

Mobile Office Visit to Lindon When: Monday, December 5, 12:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. Where: Lindon City Center, 100 North State Street, Lindon, UT 8404

Cures for Fiscal Maladies

Dec 2, 2016

The U.S. national debt is just a few months away from exceeding $20 trillion – an astronomical sum of such epic proportions that it’s difficult to fathom. Trying to understand the scale of even a fraction of it can boggle the mind. For example, if you were to spend $1 million every day since Jesus was born, you’d still be about $2.5 billion short of spending $1 trillion, and another $19 trillion short of our national debt today. And if contemplating the sheer size of the debt isn’t overwhelming – and terrifying – enough, consider the meteoric speed at which it is increasing: every second of every day, the federal governments spends roughly $27,500 more than it takes in.

Stop President Obama’s Last Special-Interest Bailout

Dec 2, 2016

In December 2008, just weeks after President Obama was first elected, environmental activists sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), claiming that the agency had failed to regulate certain “hazardous air pollutants” emitted by power plants pursuant to the Clean Air Act.