Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
As soon as the U.S. Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on Dec. 24, Republicans and conservative activists started making a promise to voters. Give them a victory in the 2010 midterm elections, and they’ll repeal the bill.
“Every Republican in 2010 and 2012 will run on an absolute pledge to repeal this bill,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who remains a key strategic thinker for the party, on the Dec. 27 episode of “Meet the Press.”
“This has an unusual ability to be repealed, and the public is on that side,” said Max Pappas, the vice president of public policy at FreedomWorks, in a Dec. 28 interview with Avi Zenilman. “The Republicans are going to have to prove that they are worthy of their votes.”
The “repeal” pledge wasn’t anything new for the GOP. In August, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, promised that passage of health care reform would put Republicans back in charge on Capitol Hill in 2011 and put him in a position to repeal the bill. In September, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., told conservative activists that a Republican Congress would “pass repealer bill after repealer bill” undoing the work of President Obama and the Democrats, with health care reform first in their sights.
But as Republicans gravitate towards a repeal message for the 2010 elections, they’re running up against the reality that health care reform would be prohibitively hard to roll back. According to conservative health care analysts, legal analysts and political strategists, if President Obama signs health care reform into law, Republicans will have extremely limited opportunities to repeal any part of it.
Read more at The Iowa Independent’s sister site, The Washington Independent.
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