#ILikeObamacare- Can't Beat Em, Join Em: Dems Go From Trying To Ban 'Obamacare' Term To Embracing It

By Susan Duclos


Weekend entertainment. Team Obama decided it would be a good idea to create a Twitter hashtag called #ILikeObamacare, obviously not considering the unintended consequences of what could possibly happen, but they were shown pretty fast when Conservatives decided to have a little fun with it like adding their own reasons for "liking" Obamacare.

Such as:

@jimmiebjr: #ILikeObamacare because I trust the same people who wrote the tax code to keep things simple, understandable, and transparent for me.

@EWErickson: #ILikeObamacare because I think responsibility is giving free condoms to our kids while we bankrupt their future.

The Daily Caller compiled a list of ten they considered the most amusing.

Seeing headlines like WSJ's that declare "Obama Embraces ‘Obamacare’," or "A Democratic Embrace for ‘ObamaCare’," from NYT, instantly brought to mind a time, not long ago, when Democrats attempted to ban the very term from being used on the House floor.

FLASHBACK: Remember this from February 2011, via The Hill and headlined with "Democrat suggests 'ObamaCare' rhetoric should be banned from House floor"?

House Republicans and Democrats started Friday morning's debate over whether to defund last year's healthcare law, and as part of this debate sparred over whether members should be allowed to call that law "ObamaCare."

After two House Republicans called it "ObamaCare," Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) asked the chairman whether these "disparaging" remarks should be allowed on the House floor.

"That is a disparaging reference to the president of the United States; it is meant as a disparaging reference to the president of the United States, and it is clearly in violation of the House rules against that," she said.

WATCH: Wasserman Schultz say Obamacare is a disparaging reference at approximately the 2:40 minute mark in the video below.



Democratic lawmakers also attempted to stop Republican lawmakers from using the term Obamacare from mass mailings as was reported in October 2011 in Roll Call.

In a recently released study reported on by The Washington Post, they found that Democratic lawmakers most likely lost control of the House of Representatives in 2010, due to their votes for Obamacare.

The study, by five professors from institutions across the country, looks at the health care bill alongside other contentious votes in the 111th Congress and determines that, more so than the stimulus or the cap-and-trade energy bill, it cost Democrats seats. In fact, they lost almost exactly the number of seats that decided the majority.

The study ran 10,000 simulations of a scenario in which all vulnerable Democrats voted against the health care bill and found that the rejections would have saved Democrats an average of 25 seats, which would have made the House parties close to a tie. (Republicans won 63 seats overall, but the study suggests around 25 of them would have been salvaged.)

In 62 percent of the simulations, Democrats were able to keep the House.

Even two years after passage of the bill through a Democratically controlled House of Representatives, Democratically controlled Senate and signed into law by Barack Obama, an overwhelming majority of Americans, even Democrats that favor the bill, believe portions of it are unconstitutional. (Source- Gallup, February 2012)

The Supreme Court next month will hear legal challenges to the healthcare law, which are focused on the law's requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance or pay a fine. Americans overwhelmingly believe the "individual mandate," as it is often called, is unconstitutional, by a margin of 72% to 20%.

Even a majority of Democrats, and a majority of those who think the healthcare law is a good thing, believe that provision is unconstitutional.

Two years later..... now Obama decides for his reelection campaign that since he and Democrats couldn't beat em, they might as well join em, and they too are now calling it Obamacare.