After Railing against the Individual Mandate for Years, Top Teabagger Jim DeMint Quits Senate to Lead Organization That Invented the Individual Mandate

In 2009, not long after Pres. Obama and the Democrats opted to forgo the single-payer option for health-insurance reform and go instead with the conservatives’ option of mandating that individuals must buy insurance from insurance corporations, the right wing abruptly disavowed their own plan, even going so far as to label it “socialism” and demonize it by referring to it as Obamacare.

Few pols and propagandists were more persistent in pushing the false narrative that Obamacare and its individual mandate were jack-booted socialism than the top teabagger in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Now, in one of those ironic turns in politics that you couldn’t possibly make up, DeMint has announced he is resigning from the Senate to run the same right-wing “thimk” tank that invented the individual mandate back in 1993, the Heritage Foundation.

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Tea Bagger Sen. DeMint Single-Handedly Killed Bipartisan Bill to Increase Senate Transparency

Sen. DeMint
Sen. DeMint
Back in the days of Republican one-party rule, today’s tea partiers were silent about the breath-taking secrecy and lack of transparency under George Bush, Dick Cheney and the GOP-controlled Congress. That makes their complaints about Democrats’ purported lack of openness now more than a little suspicious, and now one of their leaders in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, has revealed through his actions where tea partiers’ actually stand on the issue:

Secret holds allow senators to indefinitely prevent a presidential nominee from coming up for a vote, without ever having to provide a reason or identify themselves. Senate Republicans have used secret holds to an unprecedented degree under President Obama, and are currently anonymously blocking at least 52 nominees, all of whom were “noncontroversial in committee debate.”

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed new rules to rein in secret holds, but “Republicans thwarted” the bipartisan effort yesterday when Sen. Jim DeMint attached a poison pill amendment.

The usually mild-mannered Wyden was apoplectic:

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