Pelosi: ObamaCare incompetence “not my responsibility”
posted at 10:01 am on January 31, 2014 by Ed Morrissey
This appearance by Nancy Pelosi on The Daily Show starts to run off the rails almost immediately. Jon Stewart starts off by asking Pelosi about why people talk about politics rather than policy, to which Pelosi answers by … complaining about Republicans. Stewart doesn’t take the bait, though, and starts pressing Pelosi for answers as to why big-government politicians can’t produce competent government — and gets stunned by her admission that she can’t explain why ObamaCare failed:
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Stewart said that Democrats are then required to make a stronger case. He said that Democratic governance now appears “chaotic” and their execution of legislation appears to “lack efficiency.” When Pelosi again blamed Republicans for this condition, Stewart became even more agitated.
When he asked why it was so difficult to get a company to execute the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchange website “competently,” Pelosi replied, “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? How do you not know?” Stewart asked laughing.
To which Nancy Pelosi responded: “It’s not my responsibility.” Hmmm. Who ran the House when the ObamaCare bill passed, with only votes from her party? Who claimed at the time that we couldn’t know how awesome this bill would be until it passed, because you couldn’t expect politicians to actually read a 2800-page bill before they voted on it? Given that this passed entirely on votes from her own party, and with some procedural chicanery thrown in for good measure, does she feel no responsibility at all for the results of this legislation she herself championed?
That’s a pretty good answer to Stewart’s broader point. He cites the ongoing problems at the VA as evidence that there is “clearly something systemic” in government incompetence:
“Do we have a foundational problem? Is there a corruption in the system that needs to be addressed?” Stewart asked. Pelosi went on to detail the issues with bureaucracy and the failure of departments to communicate with each other. “Okay, do something about it,” Pelosi said.
“I was actually going to say that to you,” Stewart interjected.
The systemic problem is the fact that big-government regimes like ObamaCare won’t work because central planning of large economies never work, for reasons laid out by economist F. A. Hayek decades ago in The Road to Serfdom. History has only proven Hayek correct over and over again, while utopians keep insisting that the problem is just the people involved in its implementation. And Hayek predicts why incompetents and bullies end up at the top of those systems, too. Maybe Stewart should read it. It’s far too late for Pelosi.
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/31/pelosi-obamacare-incompetence-not-my-responsibility/
