TIMES ONLINE: A day after winning the health reforms on which President Obama has staked his first term in office, the White House dismissed threats to repeal the historic Bill and challenged Republicans to fight it on its substance.
Republican lawyers in at least 12 states announced repeal attempts yesterday, based on claims that the Bill to extend health insurance to 95 per cent of Americans for the first time infringes on states’ rights.
Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s press secretary, tried to disarm the legal threat that is turning into the spearhead of an angry Republican backlash to the Bill. “A lot of big pieces of legislation are challenged in some ways,” he said in the first White House briefing since Sunday’s late-night vote. Asked if he thought that the appeals would succeed, Mr Gibbs said: “We don’t.”
He also hinted at the battle to come in which Democrats will dare Republicans to claw back the new benefits and tax credits being made available to middle and lower-income Americans in the next four years as part of the $940 billion (£622 billion) legislation.
“If people want to campaign on taking tax cuts away from small businesses, taking assistance away from seniors getting prescription drugs, and a mother knowing that [her] child can’t be discriminated against by an insurance company . . . then we’ll have a robust campaign on that,” Mr Gibbs said.
It is a campaign for which Republicans are planning even as Democratic leaders in the Senate prepare to push through the final elements of a complex reform package that seemed dead just two months ago, but is now destined to change American society. >>> Giles Whittell, Washington | Tuesday, March 23, 2010
