House Teabaggers Want To Murder All Of Obamacare RIGHT NOW, Or Die Tryin'!

We're pretty sure Alice Cooper and Chuck Schumer came up with the slogans independently

While you may have heard a whole lot of rumblings from Top Republicans like Paul Ryan and that Trump guy about maybe keeping some parts of the Affordable Care Act in place, because maybe they figured out that suddenly taking away health insurance from 20 million people would not be a popular move, you'll be delighted to know that the 30-odd (very odd) members of the House Freedom Caucus are not going to stand for anything less than taking away health insurance from 20 million people, since that's what the American People (and probably Jesus) sent them to Congress to do. The Freedom Caucus, the teabaggingest teabaggers who ever teabagged, had a meeting Monday night with Vice President Mike Pence to inform him they're not going to go along with any ACA replacement that keeps any part of the hated ACA, because when they pledged to repeal Obamacare, they meant they wanted to get rid of both the "Obama" part AND the "care" part.

After the meeting with Pence, the 30-some-odd member group voted unanimously to force Speaker Paul Ryan’s hand by calling for a vote to immediately repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, even as Trump has called for keeping the popular portions of it in tact while also attempting to expand coverage nationwide.

Not even a full two months into the new Congress, Republicans have an Obamacare-sized problem on their hands, because party leaders need the Freedom Caucus’ votes to pass their agenda but the group has drawn its own red line in the sand demanding a full repeal of Obamacare as their price for being team players in the future.

Remember, these are the dipshits who decided shutting down the entire government in an attempt to make the ACA evaporate was a good idea, and they aren't going to stand for any creeping socialism like preventing insurers from revoking coverage for pre-existing conditions or letting young people stay on their parents' insurance until they turn 26, because unless you people have forgotten, that's exactly how Hitler got started. 

The Freedom Caulkers are worried that the RINOs who insist on still being the mainstream of the Republican party will betray the beautiful vision of unrestricted free market health care the Founders insisted on, including possibly a return to leeching, so they will stand for nothing less than a 100 percent repeal of the utterly unworkable Obamacare, which absolutely no one likes except maybe the nearly 50 percent of Americans who either want the law kept as it is (19 percent) or expanded (30 percent). But that Decempber 2016 poll has to be wrong and fake, since it said only 26 percent of Americans want the ACA repealed altogether, which is impossible since, as we say, the House Freedom Caucus -- the most American of Americans -- voted unanimously to commit to not accepting anything but a full repeal.

Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador explained the problem Freedom Cuckers have with keeping any part of the bill they've pledged to extirpate, root and branch:

Egad! Well golly, it's simply UNPOSSIBLE that Republicans might have opposed an idea that originated in the Heritage Foundation and that had the support of big Republican donors like the AMA and the insurance industry, and which was hailed as a "market-based" solution when Mitt Romney did it in Massachusetts, simply because it was put forward by a Democrat. Perish the thought! Ergo, to make sure no Freedom Kookers look like hypocrites, it is absolutely necessary they ruin a system that's resulted in a record low uninsured rate, and that they roll back the expansion of Medicaid that suddenly a lot of Republican governors have decided they actually rather like. It's not like anyone would die. Or at least it's not like anyone important would die.

You might also be forgiven if you were to think Labrador might be doing some political calculations of his own in insisting only on the hardest of hard-line positions on the ACA:

“Frankly our base is going to leave the party because they’re not going to be happy with something that does exactly what Obamacare did before with a different name,” he ominously warned.

Oh. We thought it was only the liberal squish RINOs that cared about whether ACA repeal would have political consequences. Imagine that. And just think what a shame it would be if Republicans got so caught up in ideological purity tests that they can't manage to repeal the ACA at all. We'd be all broke up about that, that's for sure.

[ Daily Beast / Politico / Cristina Marcos on Twitter / NPR ]