April 13, 2010 12:49 AM UTC

Norton not questioned on why de-funding health-care bill is practical

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• by: Jason Salzman

Backbone talk radio host Ross Kaminsky told me today that for his interview with Jane Norton Sunday, “I expected to get harder questions for her, and I didn’t get them [from listeners].”

So he gave her the kid-glove treatment.

For example, Kaminsky said he asked Norton a “fairly tough” question about why she doesn’t talk about “her primary opponents more.”

This question gave Norton the chance to slam Michael Bennet, praise Ronald Reagan, and conclude by saying:

“But the fact of the matter is, you have somebody running a negative campaign against me, dumping $800,000 into a negative campaign against me in the primary. Though I believe in Reagan’s 11th Commandment of never speaking ill about another Republican, certainly we have to set the record straight. Things like, when Ken [Buck] says I am for amnesty, that’s just flat out wrong and we need to address these things and set the record straight.”

No follow up questions were asked about this, though immigration policy was discussed later.

Kaminsky did a bit better earlier in the interview when he asked Norton, what he termed “sort of a hard question:”

“The criticism most frequently thrown at you is that you are a party person. I don’t believe that of you, but I wanted to give you a chance to answer that directly.”

She then told Kaminsky that the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s purchase of URLs for her campaign was a “small issue” and that it was “nonsense” for anyone “to say that I’m, you know, hand-picked” because “you know that they know they [the NRSC] don’t endorse.”  

Asked by Kaminsky about repealing the health-care law, Norton said:

“Well, realistically, I don’t think you can repeal it, with the makeup we’re seeing right now, and even if we were able to put in place conservatives in all the seats, you wouldn’t be able to repeal it because of the President’s veto power. There’s two ways that you can approach it. One is not funding those 16,000 new IRS employees that it’s going to take to implement and then police this. And then, also, insuring that each component of that 2,700 page bill is indeed constitutional.”

Kaminsky did not ask Norton why it’s more realistic for the next Congress to delete funding for a portion of the health-care bill, effectively killing it, than it would be to repeal the entire bill.  

In an interview today, Kaminsky told me that he believes deleting funding for the bill through the appropriations process would, in fact, be easier, even with Obama as President. So he had no reason to question Norton.

Also in the interview, Norton declared:

“Our principles and our civil liberties are being just jack hammered away. And if we don’t, we will lose this country forever. It’s not histrionics. Think about the situation we’re in. I mean, we have a government that is the problem. It is telling us that we have to buy a private product. It’s telling us what kinds of light bulbs we have to utilize, what kinds of homes we have to have.”

Not histrionics? Kaminsky failed to ask Norton what she meant by this, given that it sounds like she’s against municipal building codes.

Kaminsky told me in a subsequent interview that he didn’t ask Norton to clarify because he thought she was referring to the “so-called climate change legislation that does get federal involvement in building codes as well as moving to eliminate incandescent light bulbs.”