Marc Thiessen was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2009, and he has defended waterboarding — but even he thinks the Senate health care bill is “morally reprehensible.” In his latest for the Washington Post, where he is a weekly columnist, Thiessen condemns the bill: “Paying for a massive tax cut for the wealthy with cuts to health care for the most vulnerable Americans is morally reprehensible.”
Defender of waterboarding calls Senate health care bill “morally reprehensible”
“If Republicans want to confirm every liberal caricature of conservatism in a single piece of legislation, they could do no better than vote on the GOP bill in its current form,” writes Thiessen, who is also currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
This week’s Congressional Budget Office report predicted that if passed in the original form the CBO analyzed, the Senate health care bill (called the Better Care Reconciliation Act) would result in 15 million fewer Americans with health insurance as soon as next year. It also predicted that compared with the current law, by 2026, 22 million fewer people would have coverage, and within 10 years, Medicaid spending would be cut by $772 billion.
In his 2010 book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, Thiessen notoriously defended waterboarding for what he believes is its role in combating terrorism. He has also argued in favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, which the United Nations has deemed torture, in multiple Post columns. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has reiterated that torture does not work, and “even if torture did work, that does not make it legally or morally acceptable.”
So if Thiessen is calling the BCRA “morally reprehensible,” conservatives would do well to consider what that says about their health care bill.
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