Video: Rep. Steve King on Stopping the $105 Billion Snuck into Obamacare

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is not giving up the fight on de-funding the $105 Billion that was snuck into Obamacare to fund it over the next ten years. The point is very well taken and something that every Republican elected this past November on the 'Repeal / De-fund' Obamacare platform should give serious consideration to.

Via POLITICO:

Rep. Steve King says House Republicans should stick together and vote against any long-term spending agreement that doesn’t block funding for President Barack Obama’s health care law — even if it leads to a government shutdown.

And if that doesn’t work, he says, they should try it again when it’s time to raise the debt ceiling this spring.

“We’ve just got to dig in,” King said in an interview for the POLITICO series “Health Care Reform: One Year Later.” “This is the hill to fight on. This is the time to do it.

“You know that they’re like Santa’s elves in there, 24/7, energetically implementing Obamacare to get it in place, so they can expand this dependency class in America and get the roots of that malignant tumor down so deep that we can’t get ahold of it and pull it out,” King said. “That’s why I think we need to do it now.”

A little bit later in the POLITICO piece...

Now, King and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota — who has been sounding alarms about “secret” funding in the law — are trying a new tactic to knock it out. They’re rounding up signatures from other House Republicans for a letter to the GOP leadership warning that they’ll vote against any spending agreement that doesn’t shut down those funds — roughly $105 billion in appropriations that are automatically provided in the law.

“The more people that will sign on to a letter that will say that, the more there are, the stronger our position is and the more likely our leadership is to take that position, adopt it as their own and argue for it with Harry Reid and President Obama,” King said in the POLITICO interview.

It's hard to say how much support Bachmann and King have because they're not releasing the names of the members who sign their letter. Nonetheless, any freshman Republican elected as a direct result of the Tea Party influence will have betrayed their mandate less than three months into their first term unless he / she sides with King and Bachmann.

House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-KS) seems to be throwing cold water on the idea though, saying that the funding issue is part of an appropriations bill, not an authorization bill. Once again, the Republicans insist on finding ways NOT to do something while the Democrats do whatever they want. It's one thing to refuse to do something that blatantly violates a law or rule; it's another thing entirely to refuse to do what's right when, at minimum, the issue in question is a gray area. Rogers was one of the members of the House leadership to whom the letter from Bachmann and King was addressed.

Here is part of the interview with King: