Rep. Pat Meehan (PA-7) is the suburban Philadelphia Republican who won the seat Joe Sestak left for his unsuccessful Senate run. Following in the footsteps of Crazy Curt Weldon, who held the seat before Sestak, Meehan is a complete creation of the Delaware County GOP machine and typifies their arrogance. Despite promising not to support the privatization of Medicare, he just voted for Paul Ryan’s voucher plan — and his constituents aren’t too happy with him. (By the way, town halls across America are heating up over this very issue.)
First-term Rep. Pat Meehan (R-Pa.) has been the recipient of sharp questions from constituents this week about the House Republican budget and its proposed changes to Medicare.
According to CNN, Meehan was pressed at town-hall events about whether the plan from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would eliminate Medicare for people in their fifties.
“Did you not vote for Paul Ryan’s bill?” one attendee asked Meehan at a town hall on Wednesday. “Well, that is to abolish Medicare and give people some money. It will not be the Medicare that we know.”
“I said if you voted to abolish Medicare, how will you explain that to people who are in their fifties who are out of work, that they will have not the Medicare that I have?” the woman asked.
Meehan denied that he voted to abolish Medicare.
“No ma’am, I did not vote to abolish Medicare,” Meehan said. “And that is factually untrue.”
But he stood by his vote for the Ryan plan.
“I voted for the Ryan plan, let’s be clear from the outset, to talk about what was in the proposal. Now this is a blueprint,” Meehan said. “What Paul Ryan has put out is a blueprint. A sense of what we’d like to do, a direction that we’d like to go in.”
Courtesy of the Meehan Report, here’s the campaign press release Meehan put out for last fall’s election, in which he strongly denied he would do what he just did:
“Lentz charged that Meehan supports privatization of Social Security and Medicare, stating ‘Pat…wants to fix the debt by privatizing Medicare, which essentially ends Medicare, [and] privatizing Social Security…that ends Social Security.’
Meehan has repeatedly gone on record opposing any privatization of Social Security and Medicare.” [1]
Here’s the video taken when he was running against Democrat Bryan Lentz, and he promised not to vote for Ryan’s voucher program:
