Coulter delivers Lincoln Day address

Conservative political pundit Ann Coulter addressed a standing-room only crowd at the Carey Auditorium of the Hesburgh Library on Thursday night as part of Notre Dame College Republicans’ Lincoln Day event in a speech centered on health care reform, gun control and immigration.

Coulter said the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare,” made the familiar American concept of health insurance illegal in the United States and instead instituted a welfare program funded by insurance premiums. 

“Obamacare has made actual insurance illegal,” she said. “Insurance is … when a lot of people pay a small amount to a program, and then if catastrophe strikes, that will be paid for by the program.

“Hopefully you will lose your premium, hopefully you will not have a catastrophe strike, and your premiums will go to pay for other peoples’ catastrophes. That is not Obamacare. Obamacare is a welfare program, and money is collected via insurance premiums.”

Coulter said the policies written into the Affordable Care Act make it “the most regressive tax in history.”

“It is mathematically impossible to have all insurance companies cover everyone else’s smoking cessation programs, marital counseling, gambling addiction therapy, aroma therapy, speech therapy, hearing therapy and have insurance companies cover people with very, very expensive medical problems and provide insurance to people who aren’t paying their own insurance premiums and also cover me if I get cancer,” she said.

Coulter compared the Affordable Care Act to using car insurance to fund the United States Department of Defense.

“It would be as if we funded the Defense Department through car insurance payments,” she said. “So every month your premium would be $20,000, and your car insurance wouldn’t pay for both collision and liability.

“Either it would pay collision or liability, but it would buy car air fresheners for everyone. That’s Obamacare.”

Coulter said the passage of the Affordable Care Act would be almost impossible to explain to someone unfamiliar with the law. She said it passed because the Democrats claimed a majority in the Senate.

“If an alien landed and said, ‘Why did you people pass Obamacare?’ we’d have to explain ‘because the Democrats had 60 votes,’” she said. “That’s it. This major change to our health care was passed with one party saying, ‘Ha ha, we’ve got 60 votes.’

“Never before has a major piece of legislation changing everyone’s life like this been passed on pure party-line votes without a single vote from the opposing party.”

Coulter said the Affordable Care Act falls in line with the history of liberal political ideology, which she said leads to inefficiency.

“The history of liberalism is replace things that work with things that sound good on paper,” she said. “So now our entire health care system is going to be run by the people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

Coulter said as public support for the Affordable Care Act has decreased, the only Democratic defense against criticism has been the lack of a Republican health care reform alternative. She offered her own solution based on free market competition.

“I have a plan,” she said. “It’s a little something I’ve been working on. I like to call it free market capitalism. My thought is we force insurance companies to compete for our business by offering good plans at good prices.”

Coulter cited the tax code, public education, the U.S. Postal Service and Social Security, among other examples, as economically inefficient results of government intervention.

“Liberals can’t learn from what is right in front of them: Anything provided on the free market gets better and cheaper,” she said. “Anything provided by the government gets worse and more expensive.”

Coulter also addressed the issue of gun control, particularly in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., in Dec. 2013.

“After Newtown, [Democrats] were all on their high horses … but then senate leader, Democrat Harry Reid, couldn’t even get enough Democrats to hold a vote on the so-called assault weapons ban,” she said.

Coulter said liberals cite “bogus statistics” in an attempt to scare people away from guns, but she said she refuses to believe their arguments so long as liberals themselves continue to utilize “armed security,” such as bodyguards.

“As soon as politicians and these media bigwigs give up their guns or their armed security, I’ll believe them when they tell me that guns aren’t helpful,” she said. “Until then, they’re like stockbrokers telling you to ‘buy, buy, buy,’ while they’re selling, selling, selling.

“I think Americans know this. They know bald-faced hypocrisy when they see it.”

Coulter said the issue of gun control highlights her belief that as people become more educated about a topic, the more conservative their views tend to be.

“After all [the liberal] prancing around after Newtown … one year after the shooting in Newtown, support for gun control was the lowest it’s been in decades,” she said.

“And this is a corollary of the Ann Coulter theorem that the more people know about a subject, the more conservative they are. What happened after Newtown is there was a lot of talk about gun control on TV, and people who had never given it any thought got to hear the facts, and support for gun control plummeted.”

Coulter said she wished gun rights advocates would transfer their fervency into the immigration debate.

“If only immigration patriots had the self-confidence of gun enthusiasts, I don’t think we’d have to keep going through this amnesty debate every year,” she said. “The pro-mass-immigration people have the entire Democratic caucus.

“Recently, they have the media. They have many, many Republicans on their side. The only special interest group the amnesty people don’t have on their side are the American people.”

Coulter said the concept of “anchor babies,” foreigners coming to the U.S. for the sole purpose of giving birth to their child on American soil, stems from faulty logic and violates the true purpose of the fourteenth amendment

“The theory of anchor babies is ‘if I successfully break into your house, I get to own it. And if I don’t own it, then at least my kids do, but don’t punish the children, I told them we own the house,’’ she said.

Coulter said a shift in thinking has caused Americans to view immigration in a skewed way.

“It’s this weird idea that’s taken hold that it’s somehow unfair for America to skim the cream to get the best immigrants we can get,” she said. “I think we ought to be bringing in people who are better than us, not worse than us.

“What is the point of bringing in people who instantly need the taxpayers’ help? We’re not talking about our native Americans here. We know we have to take care of them. Why are we bringing in people we have to help?”

Coulter said the accusations of racism inherent in the immigration debate almost always misinterpret the issue, as immigration ultimately harms African Americans.

“Whenever this talk of immigration comes up, it is just shut down with the natural invocation of the word racism,” she said. “Well, I agree, I think there’s a lot of racism in the immigration debate, but it’s all on the pro-amnesty side.

“As has been shown in study after study after study, what our immigration policy does is bring in more than a million people a year, 90 percent from the third world, most of them low-skilled. And who does that hurt the most? It hurts low-skilled American workers … but most of all it hurts African Americans.”

Coulter said the debate would be altered if immigrants brought high-skilled labor and were more competitive in the labor market.

“I think if the immigrants we were bringing in were competing with senators, with journalists, with yuppies who need maids and nannies, we wouldn’t hear so much about compassion toward the rest of the world,” she said. “No, it hurts the most voiceless in our society.

“It’s one thing to apply quotas to make up for the Democratic policies of Jim Crow. It’s another thing to have affirmative actions and quotas for people who have never set foot in this country. We owe you nothing. If you have grievances, go back and address the perpetrators.”