April 29, 2011 10:19 PM UTC

(Newly) Responsible Republicans Beg Tea Party To Shut The Hell Up

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Business Journal’s Ed Sealover reports:

Colorado business groups got the result they wanted when the state Senate gave final approval Wednesday to a bill creating a health care exchange board, but they were not happy with the vote tally.

Every Republican in the Senate voted against Senate Bill 200, sponsored by Sen. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood. And for the first time this session, there appeared to be a real, albeit temporary, rift between the GOP and business-association lobbyists…

Every major business group in Colorado backed the measure, saying it will preserve the free market and, at the same time, help to slow skyrocketing insurance costs.

Senate Republicans led by Sen. Shawn Mitchell argued fiercely against Senate Bill 200 Wednesday, and repeatedly tried to introduce Rep. Amy Stephens’ amendment–which Stephens herself has (maybe) backed away from–that would make implementation of the exchange system contingent on Colorado seeking a complete pullout from the federal health care system. Stephens, a nominal cosponsor of SB-200, first threatened this ‘poison pill’ after being ambushed by the “Tea Party,” who accused her of capitulating to “Obamacare.” In fact, the “Tea Party” is itself split between those who favor the so-called interstate compacts to administer health care, and those who say even this loopy Confederate Health Care stuff is “too much government.”

But if an open letter sent from Tony Gagliardi, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business is any measure, there is growing fatigue appeasing the “Tea Party” monster Republicans helped create.

Here’s another truth that needs telling, and damn the political consequences, because the stakes are too high: Many of our Colorado legislators fear the wrath of Tea Party activists who have made support of Senate Bill 200, which would establish a health-care exchange similar to Utah’s, a needless ideological litmus test on which to oppose Republican lawmakers in primary elections.

Many of the goals of the Tea Party are commendable and widely shared, but in straying out of its vector and with another air traffic controller asleep in the tower, it is showing the worst side of any new political movement on this issue: The need to have a position on everything-including ones well outside their original founding purpose and, especially in the case of SB 200, their expertise.

The Colorado members of the National Federation of Independent Business, America’s leading small-business association (small businesses are 98 percent of all American businesses) support establishing a Colorado-designed health-care exchange over one that would be imposed on the state by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human services, which the Patient Protection Act gives states the option of choosing.

At the same time, NFIB is the only business group named on a federal lawsuit, along with 26 states, seeking to have all of ObamaCare (the Patient Protection Act) ruled unconstitutional. We would be delighted to see it tossed, but the need for a health-care exchange will remain…

The biggest problem for Gagliardi, and the rest of the broad coalition of business and healthcare advocacy groups who support the bipartisan health insurance exchange bill, is that Rep. Stephens showed weakness in the face of the “Tea Party’s” nonsensical clamoring. Once she gave in to their irrational demands, even if she reversed again under pressure as she appears to have done, Stephens greatly emboldened them while failing to help herself politically in any way. Primary rumors against Rep. Stephens and others have since spread unabated.

Actually, that’s the second biggest problem. The biggest problem, for elected Republicans and their “Obamacare” lawsuit-filing, Americans for Prosperity-loving benefactors,  is they’ve both relied upon and deliberately cultivated the fringe irrational angst they are now trying to squelch, so grownups can do the grownup work of solving grownup problems.

It also doesn’t help Gagliardi’s cause that he calls the health care reform law “Obamacare” in the aforementioned letter; Gagliardi can’t line himself up on the far right of the GOP, as he has done for years, and then all of a sudden chastise Republicans for listening to the Tea Party. Every elected official in Colorado knows that the NFIB under Gagliardi is about supporting Republican politics first and looking out for “small business owners” a distant second.  

Don’t expect too much gratitude for trying to bring the crazies back in line, Tony; you helped create the guest list for this goofy party, and now it’s out of control.