“An Unexploded Ordnance”: Why Republicans Secretly Hope The Supreme Court Will Save Obamacare
Because a Supreme Court decision for plaintiffs in King v. Burwell would impose extreme hardship on Affordable Care Act beneficiaries in 34 states and leave President Obama’s signature achievement in a frightening state of limbo, the law’s supporters are united in opposition to such a ruling.
And for the same reason, most analyses of the consequences of an adverse King decision have centered around the practical nightmare the ruling would create: How would states react? Congress? Insurance companies and providers? Obama himself? Will the pressure to fix the problem grow severe enough to force Republicans into surrender or to cut a reasonable deal?
These are important questions. But individually and combined, they hint at a premise that the aftermath of an adverse King ruling will exclusively effect, and be driven by, existing stakeholders. They neglect that the case itself, which will be decided in late June, is an unexploded ordnance lying in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign field. An adverse King ruling wouldn’t just introduce familiar, crisis-driven legislative politics. It would likely become the defining issue of the Republican primary and general election. It would leave Republicans strategically and substantively divided over how to contain the fallout. And it would transform Obamacare as an issue from a modest liability for the Democratic candidate, into a factor that unifies the entire party against Republicans and the Supreme Court.
Because movement conservatives have signed on enthusiastically to the arguments of the King case, they convey the impression that the right is poised and eager for the Court to do their bidding. But activists and elected officials have different imperatives, and if you immerse yourself in the Republican Party’s posture toward this case—its public attestations, blind quotes, and conspicuous silences—a much more nuanced picture emerges. If the Court grants Republicans a “victory,” many actual Republicans won’t consider it a victory at all, and the competing concerns of anti-Obamacare zealots, industry-friendly pols, swing state incumbents, governors, and presidential candidates will break out into the open.
Democrats would obviously rather win than lose this case, and Republicans vice versa. But the truth is, as one anonymous GOP congressional health care aide conveyed to TPM’s Sahil Kapur, “In fact: King wins, they [the Obama administration and Democrats] hold a lot of high cards. And we hold what?”
That’s just one anonymous aide. But a lot of Republicans are privately “joking” that they’d be happier losing this case than winning.
Some Republican insurance commissioners take a dim view of the King case publicly. Others have communicated their squeamishness by keeping their heads down.
States on both side of the issue have filed briefs with the Supreme Court. But only six red states—Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia—joined a brief on behalf of the petitioners. Conspicuously missing are deeply conservative states like Texas, with large beneficiary pools, or any swing states under GOP control. Republican senators from many of those states—including Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida—are in cycle in 2016.
By contrast, the following states have signed on to a brief supporting the government: Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia. Many of these are healthcare.gov states, and thus have a direct stake in the outcome.
The outcry for a fix will be broad, sustained, and lockstep, but it will meet wildly different audiences. Everyone in the GOP primary field will face extensive pressure to treat an adverse decision as an opportunity to get rid of the law altogether, but some of them will be governors or former governors who won’t be as amenable to using constituent suffering to leverage an unrealistic political goal. Republican Senate candidates from the above-mentioned Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, but also from Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Illinois and elsewhere, will quickly see their political fortunes become entwined with the cause of fixing Obamacare.
As chaos grows, it will be tempting for these Republicans to claim that they and the broader right bear no culpability. Obama and Obamacare did this to them. But that message won’t wash outside of precincts where antipathy to the president already runs extremely deep. Elsewhere it’ll be drowned out by a simple but forceful argument, promulgated by people with much larger megaphones—and by the fact that everything was basically OK until five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices intervened. Unlike Republicans, the team of organizers, lawyers, and political operatives who have banded together to save the ACA have adopted a strategy that precludes them from discussing their political contingency planning. But it stands to reason that Obama and Clinton would both lay the damage at the feet of those justices, and the party on whose behalf they had acted. The ruling would create a hydra of loyal but politically disengaged Obama supporters, consumer groups, health care providers, and other actors, none of whom will be satisfied with Republican excuse-making and inaction.
That returns us to the related question of whether Republicans would respond to the pressure by betraying the conservative base. Would they fix the law? Or perhaps patch it temporarily? Generally speaking, Republicans only break faith in this way when persisting would invite unsurvivable political damage. The various debt limit and government shutdown fights of the Obama years are the most similar precedents. But there are others. In recent years, Republicans proved they were willing to allow extended unemployment benefits to lapse, and the payroll tax holiday to expire. By contrast, they also revealed that they preferred to allow taxes on top earners to increase rather than explain to the broader public why they allowed taxes to increase up and down the income ladder.
In Arkansas, a now-retired Democrat expanded the state’s Medicaid program dramatically. The GOP-controlled legislature has since balked at multiple opportunities to rescind the expansion—even as its majority grew and a Republican moved into the governor’s mansion this year.
Which is the long way of saying that gaming this out is tough. But the question will be whether a ruling for King plaintiffs puts Republicans on their heels briefly, or whether it dominates campaign politics through November 2016.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, February 9, 2015
“King v. Burwell And Jindal’s Real Leverage”: Interfering With The Signals Other Republicans Are Trying To Send To The Supreme Court
Well, fate may have given Bobby Jindal his heart’s desire: a way to exert real leverage on the GOP via his aborning presidential campaign.
He sure needed some help. His efforts to be a holier-than-anyone ally of the Christian Right were probably doomed to failure against competition with the credentials of Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Rick Perry. And his record in Louisiana–increasingly criticized by Republicans as well as Democrats–is becoming a real millstone.
But thanks to a proposal on health care he first tossed into the mix last spring, Jindal is well-positioned to argue against any Obamacare “replacement” that relies on the basic structure of the Affordable Care Act, or that incorporates its budgetary assumptions, or that can be said to “compete” with the satanic instrument of socialized medicine by treating people well.
The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein thinks this is potentially a very big, and not necessarily (for Republicans) very good deal:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has laid down a marker on conservative alternatives to President Obama’s healthcare law that could shape the 2016 Republican presidential race — even if he doesn’t win.
On Tuesday, Jindal wrote a letter to Congress, putting members on notice: “(C)onservatives need to focus on truly conservative health reforms — and not merely a slightly-less-liberal plan.”
He followed this up with a speech in Washington, D.C., where he took a swipe at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
“If the whole point of this election was simply to give John Boehner and Mitch McConnell nicer offices, let’s give them back,” Jindal said, as reported by my Washington Examiner colleague Jason Russell. “What is the point of having a Republican Party if it’s only going to become a second liberal party?….”
One Republican alternative plan, first unveiled last year but re-introduced for this Congress on Thursday by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., does lean on the current Obamacare baseline. And it includes a tax increase on employer-based health insurance that helps finance generous subsidies for low-income Americans to purchase coverage.
But Republicans have another option. They could wipe out Obamacare completely, return tax and spending levels to where they would have been if the law had never passed, and build a free market alternative from scratch. This is the approach that Jindal favors and that he took when he released his own healthcare plan last year.
Going this route would mean that Republicans couldn’t spend much on subsidizing health coverage, opening them up to attacks that they’re stripping away Obamacare without offering a sufficient life raft for its beneficiaries. Jindal argues that Republicans shouldn’t fall into the trap of competing with Democrats on coverage totals and that they should instead focus on reducing costs.
Whatever the policy debate, politically speaking, it’s clear to see how Jindal’s position could influence other candidates in the Republican presidential primary. Though Jindal hasn’t been among the leaders in early presidential polls, he’s still viewed as an important policy voice among conservatives, especially on healthcare.
But there’s an even more immediate way Bobby’s attacks on any Obamacare replacement plan that seeks to “compete” with Democratic beneficence could cause problems: by interfering with the signals other Republicans are trying to send to the Supreme Court that they can avoid chaos if the Court knocks out the ACA’s subsidies in states using a federally created exchange. As reformicon Ramesh Ponnuru notes in a column criticizing Jindal’s proposal, it doesn’t just fail to avoid disruption of insurance markets and coverage–it promises a whole lot of it. And if other presidential wannabes pick up on his line of attack, the fiction that Republicans can be expected to behave responsibly in the aftermath of a shocking Supreme Court decision would vanish once and for all.
Yeah, in some respects it would be nice if Bobby just went back to his Muslim-bashing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, February 6, 2015
“Divorced From Reality”: Fewer Debates Won’t Save The GOP From Itself
Jonathan Martin reports in the New York Times that the RNC has moved aggressively to reduce the number of debates Republican candidates for president will have to endure.
The Republican National Committee moved Friday to seize control of the presidential primary debates in 2016, another step in a coordinated effort by the party establishment to reshape the nominating process.
Committee members overwhelmingly passed a measure that would penalize any presidential candidate who participated in a debate not sanctioned by the national party, by limiting their participation in subsequent committee-sanctioned forums.
The move represents the party’s effort to reduce the number of debates and assert control over how they are staged.
In making the case for adopting the new rule, party officials repeatedly criticized the moderators and format of the 2012 primary debates, appealing to the suspicions that many Republican activists have about the mainstream news media. “The liberal media doesn’t deserve to be in the driver’s seat,” said the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, addressing committee members here at their spring meeting.
This means that underdog candidates will have to weigh the advantages of appearing in unsanctioned forums versus the disadvantages of being blocked from sanctioned forums. Of course, that’s an easy decision if you haven’t been invited to the sanctioned forums in the first place.
It’s smart for the Republicans to do this, but their distrust of the mainstream media is just one more manifestation of their divorce from reality, which really took place no later than Sarah Palin’s appearance on the national stage.
When being asked what papers you read is too hard of a question, mistrust builds up in a hurry. If the Republicans are hoping to go through debate season without anyone ever puncturing their right-wing media fantasy bubble, these reforms are not going to be fully productive. And, in any case, if the candidates are cheering the death penalty and talking about the sanctity of marriage and how “severe” their conservatism is, and the wisdom of a self-deportation immigration policy then it won’t matter who the moderator happens to be.
It’s true that the Republicans had too many debates, but so did the Democrats. And it didn’t appear to hurt the Democrats at all. It made Obama a better debater.
It says something that the GOP wants to have a primary season without allowing anyone to watch or question what they are doing.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2014
“The Last Nutball Standing”: Dancing With The Mitt That Brung Ya
Conservatives picked him, and now they have to live with him.
In the early days of the 2012 Republican primaries, many thoughtful commentators took the position that it was simply impossible for Mitt Romney to win his party’s nomination. Despite all his evident strengths as a candidate—money, the most professionally run campaign in the group, the endorsement of many establishment figures—Romney simply would not find a way to get past the fact that as governor of Massachusetts he had passed a health care plan that became the model for the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans had come to see as the very embodiment of evil in the modern world. The party’s base would never abide it.
Yet he did. Without all that much trouble too. And he didn’t deal with the health care issue through some brilliant strategy, either. He made no dramatic mea culpa, and never repudiated Romneycare, at least not directly. Whenever he was asked about it he would give a convoluted and utterly unconvincing argument about how what he did in Massachusetts was great, though of course it shouldn’t be applied anywhere else, and even though the ACA is almost exactly the same as Romneycare, the latter was a pragmatic and effective policy solution while the former is an abomination so horrific that putting a copy of the bill in the same room as an American flag could cause said flag to burst into flames and be sucked through a demonic portal to the very pits of hell. Democrats shook their heads at the hypocrisy and smiled at Romney’s pain, while Republicans narrowed their eyes and listened skeptically. I feel fairly confident that there was not a single person anywhere who upon hearing Romney try to make these absurd distinctions responded with, “Well that makes sense—I’m convinced.”
And amazingly, it almost seems as if Romney thought he could get through the rest of the campaign without this coming up. Yet come up it did, when his chief campaign flak Andrea Saul responded to an ad from pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA that attacks Romney with the story of the spouse of a worker laid off from a Bain Capital-owned company who died without health insurance by saying, “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.” Saul was right, of course—in Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country after the ACA fully takes effect in 2014, losing your job doesn’t mean losing your coverage. But conservatives became apoplectic that the Romney campaign would tout Romney’s greatest achievement as governor and imply that people having secure health insurance might actually be a good thing. The less thoughtful among them insisted that Romney and his team need to be “housebroken.”
All of which, I’m sure, has caused no small amount of panic at Romney headquarters. As I keep saying, it’s just incredible that Romney still has to invest so much energy in keeping his restive base in line. By this time he’s supposed to be going after independent voters, but he can’t, because every time he turns around the right has found a new reason to be mad at him.
But really, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. Just look at the desiccated husk of a man they’ve turned their nominee into, a candidate terrified of his own shadow, devoid of anything resembling principle, so frantic to morph into whatever anyone wants him to be that there’s barely anything left of him at all. And it isn’t as though he was imposed on them or something–they picked him. Granted, he was running against a truly remarkable collection of nutballs and buffoons; imagine being a Republican and having to explain to someone a few years from now how it came to pass that at various times, your party’s front-running candidate for the presidency of the United States was Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. But still. In the end Republicans went with Mitt Romney. He’s what they chose, and they should have known that the guy they’re looking at is exactly what they’d get.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 9, 2012
The Candidates Weren’t The Only Ones On Display In Tampa
The point of presidential candidate debates is to offer the public a chance to scrutinize and evaluate those seeking national office. Occasionally, though, voters get the chance to scrutinize and evaluate those in the audience, which is nearly as interesting.
The candidates seeking the Republican presidential nomination are a pretty scary bunch — remember, one of them stands a reasonably good chance of becoming the leader of the free world in about 17 months — and the two-hour display on CNN last night was a depressing reminder of what’s become of the GOP in the 21st century. That said, maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to find the audiences for these debates even more disconcerting.
Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario to Ron Paul, asking about a young man who makes a good living, but decides to forgo health insurance. Then, tragedy strikes and he needs care. Paul stuck to the libertarian line. “But congressman,” the moderator said, “are you saying that society should just let him die?”
And at that point, some in the audience shouted, “Yeah,” and applauded.
Earlier in the debate, Blitzer asked Rick Perry about his attacks on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. “I said that, if you are allowing the Federal Reserve to be used for political purposes, that it would be almost treasonous,” Perry said. “I think that is a very clear statement of fact.”
The audience loved this, too.
What’s more, note that in last week’s debate, the mere observation that Perry has signed off on the executions of 234 people in Texas, more than any other governor in modern times, was enough to generate applause from a different GOP audience.
Taken together, over the last five days, we’ve learned that the way to impress Republican voters, at least the ones who show up for events like these, is to support letting the uninsured die, accusing the Fed of treason for trying to improve the economy, and executing lots of people.
There’s a deep strain of madness running through Republican politics in 2011, and it appears to be getting worse. Those wondering why the GOP presidential field appears weak, insipid, and shallow need look no further than the voters they choose to pander to.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 13, 2011
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