Koch-Backed Group Targets GOP Lawmaker Open To Obamacare Medicaid Expansion
Source: TPM
As part of its state-by-state effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, a group backed by billionaire conservative benefactors Charles and David Koch is going after a Republican lawmaker in Virginia who has signaled an openness to the law's Medicaid expansion.
An article published Saturday in The New York Times details how the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity is employing a grassroots campaign to pressure state lawmakers to reject the Medicaid expansion under the health care law.
The group is currently going all out in Virginia, where this year's gubernatorial race pits a Democrat who favors expansion (Terry McAuliffe) against a Republican who opposes (Ken Cuccinelli). It's also targeting Republican state Sen. Emmett W. Hanger Jr., who is considering signing off on the expansion.
This has been one of those trench warfare kind of efforts for a year now, and I think it is one of those hidden stories of the whole fight against Obamacare, Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, told the Times. Its not flashy; its just in a whole bunch of state capitals and in the districts of a whole lot of state legislators, but its such a crucial aspect of the overall long-term effort to roll back Obamacare.
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/koch-backed-group-wages-trench-warfare-against-obamacare-medicaid-expansion
It is worthwhile to remember that Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin are just figureheads. The real power behind the suicide caucus are the right wing billionaires who are willing to smack any Republican who flirts with sanity.
Jack Rabbit
(45,984 posts)The Tea Party is not America's domestic enemy, as Congressman Cohen told a TV interviewer this morning. The enemies are the right wing billionaires, of whom the Kochs are but two, who think they have the right to rule by divine right. This a major assault on democracy itself. The industrial/financial aristocracy that today seeks absolute power through Citizens United and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is no more an aristocracy (from the Greek meaning rule by the best) than was the landed aristocracy that ruled Europe from the Dark Ages through the Enlightenment, when the so-called "aristocrats" had their heads handed to them by the French Revolution.
We owe them no allegiance and vow to give them none. Their primacy over what is supposed to be the people's government must be destroyed.
Well said. The Kochs are a blight upon this nation.
IrishAyes
(6,151 posts)I agree a good deal with Jack too.
Squinch
(51,007 posts)Wuddles440
(1,127 posts)As Georgia Pacific is an operating division of Koch Industries, avoid purchasing any consumer products they produce under such trade names such as Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Brawny, Sparkle, Mardi Gras, Vanity Fair, and Dixie.
gopiscrap
(23,765 posts)okaawhatever
(9,462 posts)that's what the Koch Brothers would love, for a bunch of Democrats to stay home and have another 2010 outcome.
kiranon
(1,727 posts)for them in some way. Money may override ideology - it usually does.
Myrina
(12,296 posts)Myrina
(12,296 posts)I don't understand their obsessive opposition to ACA, except in the context that they're pissed that insurance companies are going to get rich(er) & they don't own any.