Today on this annual Holocaust Memorial Day, we pause to remember all those tragically lost in the Holocaust. In this horrible blemish on our world’s history, millions were persecuted and put to death. We also must take time to remember the survivors of the Holocaust who are forever affected by the nightmare of those events. Their strength to carry on and expose the atrocities of the Holocaust is to be commended.

This Holocaust Memorial Day marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz. On January 27, 1945 the Soviet Army entered the camp, near the prewar German-Polish border, and freed the remaining prisoners. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum it is estimated at least 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz alone, with a total of 1.3 million people deported there between 1940 and 1945.

We must let today serve as a reminder of what evil dictators can do when they go unchecked. We also must remain aware of what is being said against our nation and against our allies around the world. Never again can a tyrant or dictator be allowed to seek the destruction of human life like was witnessed in the Holocaust.

In a game-changing announcement two days before President Obama’s State of the Union address, the White House has called for a freeze in discretionary spending in 2011. As a constant advocate to rein in government spending, I am pleased that President Obama has publicly acknowledged the need to cut spending—unfortunately, he does not seem to take the task too seriously.

President Obama’s announcement comes only after he increased 2010’s spending levels by 13 percent.  Announcing a freeze after first increasing your budget is like touting one’s fiscal restraint when they have cut up maxed out credit cards.   Even if spending is frozen or reduced in the 12 annual appropriation bills, that does not guarantee emergency measures, similar to the so-called stimulus bill will not be introduced and in-turn, be added to the deficit.

In fact, he seems to have failed to garner support from his own party. According to The Hill, several House Democrats immediately rejected the idea. Citing that this change may actually hurt the economy, Congressional Democrats would rather see the White House spend more federal dollars than less. In the slight chance Congress actually follows the President’s suggestions, only $250 billion will be saved in 10 years. That’s less than half the amount of the so-called stimulus package and less than one-third the cost of the Democrats’ health care legislation.  

It is not too late. Only a fraction of the stimulus funds have actually been spent and health care seems to be all but dead in Congress.  I welcome the President’s spending freeze, but I challenge the Administration not to stop there. If the President is serious about controlling our national debt, he needs to readdress his agenda and stop pushing a national energy tax or government take-over of health care.  

I wish I could be surprised that the report on ACORN requested by Democratic Reps. Barney Frank and John Conyers of the Congressional Research Service is a mere gloss over of the tainted group. Matthew Vadum, at BigGovernment.com, reports on the recently published CRS Report calling it “an incompetent whitewash” and saying:

“apparently Congressional Research Service employees are as good at research as ACORN employees are at registering voters.”

In a press release issued by Frank and Conyers, they cite a finding by CRS of:

“no instances of individuals who were allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN or its employees and who were reported ‘attempting to vote at the polls.’”

We know this is not the case.

Registered in two counties by ACORN, Claudel Gilbert of Reynoldsburg, Ohio pleaded guilty to voting in a county in which he did not live, and voting twice; both felonies.

Unfortunately, this is not the lone example.

Vadum cites the instance of Darnell Nash who was registered to vote nine times by ACORN.

For a group who has received so many federal dollars over the years, more complete research should have been done. Instead of doing real leg work, CRS researchers plugged some terms into a computer program to result in news articles regarding ACORN.

I certainly wish the next review of ACORN, expected to be released by the Government Accountability Office, will provide more information about the actual actions of ACORN. Maybe one government organization will be serious about cracking down on the corruption which abounds in the group.

If the 2.7 millions jobs that have been lost since the so-called stimulus was signed into the law did not convince you that government spending does not correlate into economic growth, take a look at this story from the Associated Press: Stimulus Cash Doesn't Create Local Jobs:

“A federal spending surge of more than $20 billion for roads and bridges in President Obama's first stimulus has had NO EFFECT on local unemployment rates, raising questions about his argument for billions more to address an ‘urgent need to accelerate job growth.’ An Associated Press analysis of stimulus spending found that it didn't matter if a lot of money was spent on highways or none at all: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless. And the stimulus spending only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, the analysis showed.”

Yet, President Obama wants to pass a second stimulus calling for billions of dollars of more spending. When will the President and Democrat leadership learn that spending money we don’t have isn’t always the remedy to fix whatever problem confronts us? When will they get the hint? Republicans have put forth a better way to give our families the relief they need that will turn our economy around.

Yesterday I mentioned that the Obama Administration and Democrat Congressional leaders plan to meet behind closed doors to reconcile their two differing versions of health care reform. So much for President Obama’s pledge to make the entire health care reform process open and transparent. In fact, C-SPAN has asked Congressional leaders to reconsider their thinking and allow the network to air the full proceedings.

As it turns out, providing an open and transparent negotiation process isn’t the only broken promise.  The Senate’s version includes a significant tax increase on the middle class that comes in the form of increased taxes on “Cadillac” insurance plans. Democrats attempted to label these insurance plans “Cadillac” in order to give the impression that people with these types of plans are wealthy. The problem for Democrats is that a large segment of folks with these plans are hard-working American families.

Fox News reports.

The Senate bill raises the biggest chunk of its new revenue through a 40 percent tax on so-called Cadillac health insurance plans -- plans that cost more than $23,000 per family.  And that tax, critics say, will trigger a series of changes that will result in billions of dollars in new taxes on the middle class over the next decade.

First, the tax will hit plans widely used by middle-class employees. The majority of workers with the high-value plans are union members and state government employees who are not considered wealthy, even though Obama advisers like to say the tax is aimed at benefits enjoyed by the likes of Wall Street bankers.

‘A lot of those folks that have Cadillac plans have Chevy wages. And that's what makes it, has made it, somewhat controversial and a real issue of contention,’ said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy with the non-profit think tank Third Way.

And according to the New York Times:

The tax would apply to nearly 20 percent of all workers with employer-provided health coverage in the country, affecting some 31 million people. Within six years, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax would reach a fifth of all households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually. Those families can hardly be considered very wealthy.

All eyes will be on these health care negotiations in the coming weeks, and I hope Democrat Congressional leaders reverse course and allow these negotiations to be viewed by the public. They’ve already locked Republicans out of these critical negotiations. They shouldn’t do the same to the American public.

This week both the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that there’s a good chance the Democrats will bypass a formal conference committee to hash out the differences between the House and Senate health care bills and instead, create a final bill out of the public eye and behind closed doors.

Since both chambers passed two different bills, negotiators must work to pass one uniform bill before it can be sent to the President for his signature. Votes in both the House and Senate were extremely tight and several issues must be reconciled before final passage including abortion, taxes, cuts to Medicare, and the public option. It appears the Democrats wish to do this outside of public scrutiny to speed up the process in hopes of getting it done and signed into law before the President makes his State of the Union speech. This is far from Mr. Obama’s pledge to keep the health care reform process open and transparent.

While the health care debate seems to have taken a back seat for a bit,  House and Senate negotiators are trying to hammer out details of legislation upon which both chambers can agree. It'll be an arduous process.  No one is certain how it will play out and what the final bill will look like. But one thing we do know is that whatever bill comes out of the Conference Committee, it will be bad for America's seniors.

It's no secret that the Democrats hope to cut $500 billion from Medicare, which covers America's disabled and those 65 years of age and older. But even without the cuts, the Mayo Clinic announced starting the first of this year that they will stop accepting Medicare patients at one of its primary-care clinics in Glendale, AZ. It’s feared that this move will be replicated by family doctors, many of whom have already stopped accepting new patients from the program because the U.S. government reimburses them too little. 

Here are some startling statistics revealed in the Bloomberg article:

~ Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic.

~ Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007.

~ While 92 percent of U.S. family doctors participate in Medicare, only 73 percent of those are accepting new patients under the program.

While no one here in Congress argues that America's health care system is perfect the way it is, what is clear is that the Democrat's plans to reform it will make it worse.

Republicans have presented a better way, but it's fallen on Democrat leadership's deaf ears here in the Capitol.