GOP Candidate Teresa Collett On Shutting Down Govt: ?If The Stakes Are High Enough, We?re Going To Have To?
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 14th, 2010 4:38 am by HL
On Saturday, ThinkProgress spoke to Teresa Collett, a Republican running against Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), at the Mayflower Hotel during lobbyist Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. During the interview, Collett expressed outrage at the health reform bill passed by Congress this year and supported by her opponent.
Collett argued that tactically, even if Republicans take over the House, repealing health reform would be difficult because President Obama could easily veto any repeal effort. However, Collett reasoned that a Republican House of Representatives could defund programs to expand coverage made possible by health reform. She also said that “if the stakes are high enough,” she would support a move to shut down the entire federal government to force a showdown over health reform:
TP: I spoke to several of the delegates here, and some of the speakers, who said — including Newt Gingrich — who said it might come down to a budget battle where the federal government might need to be stopped temporarily to force President Obama to the table. What do you think about that?
COLLETT: I think if the stakes are high enough, we might have to do that. Now that has real consequences to real people in lots of different ways. So, certainly that is not the first best option, but what’s at stake is very important so that decision will have to be made at that time.
Watch it:
Collett’s sentiment about shutting down the federal government echoes a similar argument made by another speaker at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), speaking on Friday, said that Republicans would shut down the federal government — even veterans’ hospitals — to eliminate programs like health reform.
Yesterday on Fox News, Newt Gingrich — the architect of a government shut down confrontation with President Clinton in the ’90s — said that Republicans might shut down the government again next year if they win back control oft he House. Asked by host Chris Wallace if Republicans would adopt such a strategy, Gingrich replied that he doubted whether a Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) would be up for the “challenge.” But, Gingrich said, if the “president wants to push it,” a shut down is “possible.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) “opened the door to a compromise” on the Bush-era tax cuts on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, saying “if the only option I have is to vote for some” tax reductions for families earning less than $250,000, “I’ll vote for them.” The White House said today it hopes Boehner will because “the middle class should not be used as a political football.”
The ninth anniversary of 9/11 attacks in New York Saturday ended in a clash between supporters and opponents over Park 51. Several hundred protesters of the project, including UN Ambassador John Bolton and anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders, met with “about 300 supporters of the project” — a coalition of liberal and civil rights groups holding signs that said “U.S. Tolerates All Religions.”
Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York City, said yesterday that “given the choice to do it over again, he would have never proposed building it near ground zero.” “I would never have done it,” Rauf said on ABC’s “This Week,” noting his surprise at the intensity of the Islamophobic backlash he has faced.
American-style law enforcement will no longer work in the fight against Afghan corruption, the Obama administration has concluded. Many senior administration officials have concluded that corruption trials against Afghan lawmakers should be resolved with face-saving compromises behind closed doors instead of public trials.
“Two Afghans died in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan on Sunday when the police fired into a crowd protesting the planned burning” of the Qur’an by extremist pastor Terry Jones. The deaths join an earlier killing of a demonstrator protesting the same event.
The Obama administration plans to offer Saudi Arabia “the largest U.S. arms deal ever,” which will include $60 billion in advanced aircraft such as jets and helicopters. The administration, which must get approval of the deal from Congress, says doing so may create as many as 75,000 U.S.-based jobs.
The Senate Impeachment Trial Committee will meet today to discuss the impeachment of federal judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr., who is accused of corruption, accepting kickbacks, as well as lying to the Senate and FBI during his nomination process. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Porteous last year, making him the 15th federal judge ever impeached.
And finally: Campus Progress has caught Bieber fever. The student advocacy group is “highlighting a submission to its VoteAgain2010 video contest that argues, while [Internet savvy pop star Justin] Bieber can’t vote in our midterms (he’s both too young and too Canadian), shouldn’t you?” “We’re trying to leverage Bieber fever” to get young people to vote, said Campus Progress’s Sara Haile-Mariam.
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