Misblog

House Minority Leader Boehner sounds like a Democrat leveling ad hominem attacks against Republicans!

“The Administration and congressional Democrats are literally bullying health care groups into cutting backroom deals to fund a government takeover of health care,...That will increase costs and force millions of Americans out of the health care that they currently have.”--Roll Call quoting Congressman John Boehner (R-Ohio), July 8, 2009--

It seems exactly the kind of tough negotiations and compromises we'd expect from an administration trying very hard to balance the interests of all Americans, including the 45 million Americans lacking healthcare coverage.

Boehner's "henney penny" rhetoric is not unlike Senator William Maclay's (Anti-Administration-PA, 1789-1791) during our nascent nation's intense debate over whether our federal government should assume the massive states' debt¹ after our Revolutionary War.

"The Secretary's [Alexander Hamilton] people [aka "Hamilton's Gladiators"] scarce disguise their design, which is to create a mass of debts which will justify them in seizing all the sources of Government, thus annihilating the State Legislatures and creating an empire on the basis of consolidation.--Maclay Jounal, April 10, 1790²

Web:

• Reuters, Democrat Hoyer: mull all options to pay for health reform

  "...that he [Alexander Hamilton] ardently wishes to see it incorporated, as a fundamental maxim, in the system of public credit of the United States, that the creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment." --Report on Public Credit, United States Treasury Department, January 9, 1790, Submitted by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.--

• Reuters, Republicans: U.S. healthcare timetable may slip

-----notes-----

1. President George Washington and Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton where jointly and separately doing everything in their power to ensure our new nation developed into the United States.

Both saw assumption of the states’ debt as a way of enticing our notoriously independent states into supporting a strong federal government:

New Hampshire...$300,000; Massachusetts...4,000,000; Rhode Island and Providence Plantations...200,000; Connecticut...1,600,000; New York...1,200,000; New Jersey...800,000; Pennsylvania...2,200,000; Delaware...200,000; Maryland...800,000; Virginia...3,200,000; North Carolina...2,200,000; South Carolina...4,000,000; Georgia...300,000; Total:...$21,000,000 (between $490 and 510 million 2009 dollars—it is of limited, if any, value to compare 1790 and 2009 dollars, but nevertheless interesting).

See also, George Washington University, Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789-1791, Funding the National Debt, (last visited July 09, 2009).

2. The Constitution Society, THE ASSUMPTION AND NATURALIZATION BILLS, April 10, 1790, http://www.constitution.org/ac/maclay/journal06.txt (last visited July 09, 2009).