Pence Tells Tea Partiers To 'Remember In November'

A prominent House conservative told participants in the second annual 9/12 Rally in Washington yesterday that the Obama administration is using the recession to wage socioeconomic war.

“No American should face a tax increase in January…not one. We will not compromise our economy to accommodate the class warfare rhetoric of this administration,” said Mike Pence (R-Ind.), Chairman of the House Republican Conference. Pence told the roughly 100,000 in attendance to stand against President Obama’s attempt to allow a series of tax cuts for the wealthy to expire at the end of this year.

“We do not consent to higher taxes on any American in the worst economy in 25 years. When did higher taxes ever get anybody hired?”

Pence spoke at the same rally last year, which focused mainly on drumming up resistance to a healthcare reform bill that would later become law. This year, the message from Pence and other speakers, including conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), was purely political.

Pence urged the audience to focus on voting out liberal members of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, while Cuccinelli touted his own efforts to stop provisions within the aforementioned healthcare law from going into effect in his state.

The rally was organized by the conservative nonprofit organization FreedomWorks, along with a number of smaller local Tea Party groups. Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project played an additional role in helping organize the rally both this year and last.

Senate Candidate Joins Movement To Repeal Healthcare Law

Add Ovide Lamontagne to the list of candidates running for office this November who have taken a pledge to fight to repeal the healthcare reform law signed by President Barack Obama earlier this year.

“What was known is that [the law] would take over nearly one sixth of our economy and puts it in the hands of the command and control planners of the federal government,” said Lamontagne, who is running for the seat occupied by the outgoing Judd Gregg (R). “What was not known was just how incredibly complex and overwhelmingly bureaucratic Obamacare would be.”

Lamontagne, who will face U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) in this fall’s election, joins conservative Republicans Sharron Angle (Nev.), Ken Buck (Colo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), Mike Lee (Utah), Dino Rossi (Wash.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) as candidates who have vowed on record to reverse some, if not all parts of the law.

For some, their desire to repeal the law is rooted in its mandate on individuals to purchase health insurance by 2014 or risk facing punishment. According to Lamontagne, it’s the creation of added government to help carry out the law’s provisions.

“The legislation creates almost 160 new programs and bureaucracies…This is “progressive’ engineering at its worst.”

Additionally, Lamontagne says he is wary of newly appointed Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Donald Berwick.

“Mr. Berwick, known for his views promoting rationed medicine, will now act as a health care Czar, overseeing a massive shift of a significant part of our economy to the federal government.”

Administration Officials Tout New Report On Status Of Medicare

The Democrats’ sweeping healthcare reform law will extend the life of the Medicare hospital insurance fund by 12 years, according to a new government report on the status of Medicare and Social Security.

According to U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the nation’s Medicare trust fund should stay solvent until 2029. In addition, the healthcare overhaul, passed earlier this year, improves the long-term outlook for the Social Security trust fund, which analysts previously warned will be depleted by 2037. In 2010, Social Security expenditures will exceed receipts for the first time in more than 25 years.

While the short-term prognosis for the two big entitlements is slightly troublesome, Geithner said the Medicare figures are encouraging.

“These are very, very substantial improvements,” he said during a briefing on Thursday.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius added that the “outlook for Medicare has improved greatly,” as a result of the new healthcare law.

Sebelius, however, said that Congress must work on finding a permanent solution to the way in which physicians that accept Medicare are reimbursed by the federal government. Congress recently extended the “doc-fix” as it is known, but officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have concluded that continued temporary fixes will in the long run negate some of the savings produced by the Affordable Care Act.