Crucial choices ahead

LITTLE ROCK — Let it never be said that our words, pledges and promises don’t matter.

Republicans newly elected to Congress already are feeling the heat to put their convictions where many of their mouths and campaign ads have been.

The question is how many of them will gird their jaws, step to the forefront and say thanks but no thanks to the cushy, government-provided health insurance plan come January.

Will they be willing to place themselves in a similar position to millions of voters who are feeling trapped and overwhelmed by government mandates?

Under the comfy way things have stood in D.C., Congress folk and their staffs receive health care coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan, which grants stipends to cover the cost.

There’s even pressure from within to change the status quo. GOP Reps.-elects Bobby Schilling of Illinois and Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, both opponents of the highly unpopular Obamacare law, say they’ll refuse the federal health plan, and more, when they assume their seats next year.

“I have term-limited myself,” Schilling has stated. “I am not taking the pension. I am not taking pay raises, and my family and I are bringing our own health care to Washington, D.C.”

That kind of talk actually sounds a bit like our original Congress that was composed of non-professional politicians who placed public service above serving themselves.

This early pledge could well prompt other freshman lawmakers to join them to repeal and replace the Obamacare law now under challenge by some 20 states’ attorneys general, into joining them.

Some labor unions, most notably the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, already are challenging the incoming conservative lawmakers to stand for what they’ve advocated by declining the government coverage. No surprise there. This administration gave Big Labor plenty of political bailout pay-back in taxpayer largesse.

Democrats recognize the political opportunity to shout. “Hypocrites!” Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York sent a letter to GOP leaders signed by 60 Democrats arguing that critics of a government-backed coverage expansion should “walk that walk” and refuse their federally subsidized coverage.

“If your conference wants to deny millions of Americans affordable health care, your members should walk that walk,” stated the letter addressed to House Speaker-designate John Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “You cannot enroll in the very kind of coverage that you want for yourselves and then turn around and deny it to Americans who don’t happen to be members of Congress.”

But unions and Democrats aren’t alone, according to the account of this development by Mike Lillis in The Hill health care blog. A survey has found the majority of voters want congressional opponents of the new health care law to decline the government coverage. In fact, 53 percent of voters in a survey by Public Policy Polling said that lawmakers who ran against Barack Obama’s controversial health care reforms should remain true to their rhetoric and refuse the traditional coverage. Among Republican voters, that figure jumped to 58 percent.

A Boehner spokesman told The Hill that he sees nothing hypocritical about Republicans accepting the existing government coverage. The national GOP chairman, Michael Steele, chimed in that Boehner, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid and tens of millions of Americans, simply receives coverage through his employer, and that coverage has nothing to do with Obamacare, “which will wreck Americans’ health care and bankrupt our country.”

In one sense, Steele seems right. The long-standing health plan for congressmen is not actually linked with Obamacare. But in case no one’s been watching since 2008, there’s been a much different political climate ever since millions of protesting Americans said they are fed up and angry about the way self-serving politics has been conducted in D.C. for much too long.

Just because lawmakers like Pelosi and Reid have been doing it all along doesn’t make it right. Most Americans will tell you that those who make the laws should not have it better than those upon whom their laws are imposed.

So today each new congressman, including the three newly elected GOP Arkansas representatives and Sen.-elect John Boozman, will face this decision. They all are continually watched from every angle. If they fail to live up to campaign rhetoric or don’t individually act out their lip service toward restoring honor and integrity to the process, well, I predict a brief career.

As I’ve written several times, I believe that most Americans are demanding honorable behavior from their Congress with the best interest of all Americans and our nation at heart. What a mess these egocentric people already have made of our nation.

It’s time to man (and woman) up. The days of many tough decisions are fast approaching, and only inner strength and heroic levels of character will decide each lawmaker’s survival or political demise.

Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.