Bachmann Blasts Hidden $105B Obamacare Tab

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., says she is willing to see the government shut down unless a $105 billion appropriation the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress hid in Obamacare is returned and the GOP House leadership will meet Tuesday afternoon to consider its next step. Her comments came on the heels of her making the funding-deception revelation in an exclusive Newsmax interview.

Bachmann said members of Congress didn’t know the money to implement Obamacare was in the healthcare legislation until a Congressional Research Service report came out in February, because they couldn’t read the bill before they voted and it passed.

“This is an enormous sum of money – this was tucked away inside the Obamacare bill,” Bachmann Monday said on Fox News. “People say: ‘Well, what’s wrong with you members of Congress, why didn’t you know it’s there?’ It’s because we didn’t get the bill until literally a couple of hours before we were supposed to vote on it, and it’s 2,900 pages long.

“What they did is they took the bill – this amount of money – split it up and put it in different sections of the bill,” she said. “Nobody knew until February when it [the report] came out. We had an eagle eye from the Heritage Foundation, Ernest Istook, a former [Oklahoma] member of Congress, found this in this report – he wrote a few blog posts. One of my colleagues, [Rep.} Steve King from Iowa, also found out about this, and we’ve been trying to do everything we can to alert people and say: Give the money back!”

Bachmann said she thinks the deception was intentional.

“Do you think that [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid, this just, like, escaped his memory to tell the senators: Oh, by the way, if you vote for Obamacare, you’re also voting for another $105 billion in money?

“I think they knew. I think this was intentional,” she added. “That’s why I say, [President Barack] Obama, Reid, and [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi – they owe us an apology, and an explanation. But they need to give the money back. The bad news is Obamacare is funded for the next eight years – the implementation.”

Bachmann noted there is a way to make sure the money is not used.

“The good news is we have this two-week continuing resolution, government runs out of money on March 18,” she explained. “This is what we propose: We’ve written language to add on to the next continuing resolution, that says, Obama, Pelosi, Reid – you give this money back … and then we will start talking about the budget.”

Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked Bachmann whether the GOP leadership is in agreement, and will all the Republicans in the House hold the line that they would shut down the government unless the money is returned.

“Well, that’s what we are going to talk about this week, when we go back to Washington, D.C.,” she said. “We’re going to have a meeting tomorrow [Tuesday] to explain. A lot of members don’t even know about this yet, this outrage.”