March 5, 2009: Republicans Call Obama’s Health Care Plans ‘Socialism’

Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN—see October 17-22, 2008), interviewed by conservative radio host William Bennett, decries what she calls the Obama administration’s push for “socialized medicine” and a “new tax on energy,” and says: “If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years, I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism.… And as the Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels—that’s what they’re very good at—they’re trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren’t able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated.” [Think Progress, 3/5/2009] Bachmann is joined by House colleague Zach Wamp (R-TN), who says of the Obama health care plan: “It’s probably the next major step towards socialism. I hate to sound so harsh, but… this literally is a fast march towards socialism, where the government is bigger than the private sector in our country and health care’s the next major step, so we oughta all be worried about it.” [Huffington Post, 3/5/2009]