Democratic lawmakers have "no more excuses" once the budget deal is passed, and will have to face the music as the Affordable Care Act wreaks havoc, says former Florida congressman Allen West.
"The most important thing is the Democrats own this now . . . No more excuses. Now we can talk about the failures that we can see," West told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"Now we can talk about the adverse effects [the Affordable Care Act will have] upon small-business owners and people who are being put on part-time and taken off of full-time-equivalent employment."
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West called GOP lawmakers in the House who vote for the Senate-brokered deal "some real squishy Republicans."
But West doubts the more conservative voices of the party will try to boot House Speaker John Boehner, who has been under the gun for not bowing enough to tea party Republicans.
"The last thing you want to do is to get even more fuel to the camp of the Democrats and have a circular firing squad. We don't need that," West said.
"The most important thing Republicans in the House and in the Senate, they need to come together and they need to finally be able to unify as a voice and stop with a lot of the infighting."
He added that the GOP must put forward "strong spokesmen and women that can really talk about the unconstitutional actions of this administration, talk about how they're trying to stand up for hardworking American families as opposed to the hypocritical elitists of the liberal-progressive Democrat Party, who are saying one thing but doing the complete other thing."
West, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, called Obamacare — and the tweaks that have been made to it by the Obama administration since it became law — "a slap in the face" to Americans.
"I am glad to see they have the income verification as part of the subsidy request and application. That's an important thing, but we need to repeal the medical device tax because we're in a fragile recovery — almost nonexistent recovery — and the medical device tax is just going to hurt our economy even more," he said.
"We're limping along between 1.5 and 2 percent GDP growth, and you have a federal government that is spending about 25 percent of our GDP, and that's supposed to grow to about 30 to 32 percent between now and the next eight years.
"So, we're looking at a catastrophic situation . . . Once again the American people have been let down."
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