“The GOP In Fantasyland”: Unhinged, Uncontrollable And Fully Capable Of Knocking Themselves Out
The make-believe crusade by publicity-hound Republicans to somehow stop Obamacare is one of the most cynical political exercises we’ve seen in many years. And that, my friends, is saying something.
Charlatans are peddling the fantasy that somehow they can prevent the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from becoming what it already is: the law of the land. Congress passed it, President Obama signed it, the Supreme Court upheld it, many of its provisions are already in force, and others will soon take effect.
No matter how contemptuous they may be about Obamacare, opponents have only two viable options: Repeal it or get over it.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) the Canadian American who appears to be running for president, has grabbed headlines and air time by being the loudest advocate of an alleged third option: Congress could refuse to fund Obamacare, thereby starving it and effectively killing it. This is a ridiculous fantasy, as Cruz, who has brains beneath all that bombast, surely knows.
Congress needs to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government beyond Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. The idea, if you can call it one, is that Republicans can refuse to pass any funding bill that contains money for implementing Obamacare.
Theoretically, Republicans could pull this off in the House, where they hold the majority. But the chance that a bill stripped of money for the Affordable Care Act could make it through the Senate, where Democrats hold power, is precisely zero. The chance that a House-Senate conference would starve Obamacare to death while Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) remains the majority leader is also zero.
And if by some miracle such a bill were to make it to Obama’s desk, the chance he would sign it is way less than zero. To swallow the snake oil that Cruz and some other hard-right conservatives are peddling, you have to believe Obama is willing to nullify the biggest legislative accomplishment of his presidency.
So with the bill vetoed and no authorization to spend money, much of the government would have to shut down.
This gambit damaged the Republican Party back when Newt Gingrich tried it. In today’s toxic political climate, with approval ratings for Congress sinking toward single digits, it could be catastrophic. As things stand, Democrats have an uphill struggle next year to win the 17 House seats they need to regain the majority in that chamber. If the GOP forces a shutdown, however, Democrats’ chances might get better.
The basic elements of Obamacare — including the mandate that compels individuals to buy health insurance or pay a fine — originated in conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation. So it is beyond ironic that Heritage — under its new leader, former senator Jim DeMint — is pushing hard for the defund-Obamacare suicide leap.
DeMint has gone so far as to make a campaign swing through the South and the Midwest, whipping up support among the GOP base. Asked by an audience member in Arkansas why Congress should pass a bill starving Obamacare when everyone knows Obama would never sign it, DeMint replied, “Well, we don’t know that, do we?”
Come on. We know.
And we also know that painting Obamacare as the end of America as we know it is an effective way for DeMint to rebrand Heritage , moving it away from mainstream Republican orthodoxy into tea party la-la land. Noisemaking and fundraising go hand in hand; this crazy exercise promises to be very bad for the GOP, but it might end up being very good for the Heritage Foundation’s coffers.
Similarly, Cruz gets to preen before a national audience and demonstrate the fervor of his opposition to Obama and all that he stands for. “If you have an impasse, you know, one side or the other has to blink,” he said recently. “How do we win this fight? Don’t blink.”
The GOP establishment is blinking like crazy. Trying to defund Obamacare has little support among Republicans in the Senate. “I’m for stopping Obamacare, but shutting down the government will not stop Obamacare,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said recently, demonstrating a grasp of reality.
The Republican majority in the House, though, is . . . what’s the word? Unpredictable? Uncontrollable? Unhinged? They pay little attention to wise political advice and less attention to their leader, Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. And while they can’t lay a glove on Obamacare, they’re fully capable of knocking themselves out.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 22, 2013
“Between The Right And A Hard Place”: Hey Republicans, Why Should My Family Suffer Because You Have A Partisan Axe To Grind?
When it comes to the federal health care system, congressional Republicans have found themselves in an increasingly awkward position. Their far-right base and allied right-wing activist groups continue to push GOP lawmakers to shut down the government — and quite possibly default on U.S. debts — in the hopes of sabotaging the Affordable Care Act.
And yet, many Americans who recognize the benefits of “Obamacare” continue to push in the opposite direction. We saw this two weeks ago in North Carolina, last week in Florida, and yesterday, this amazing clip out of Nevada was released by American Bridge. Watch on YouTube
In this clip, we see a small business owner in Las Vegas who had some straightforward questions for Rep. Joe Heck (R-Nev.): “Why would you oppose the ACA at every turn?” and “Why would you oppose something that’s helping me now?”
When local events erupted during the 2009 August recess, months before the Affordable Care Act became law, the right found it fairly easy to exploit public confusion — throw around some garbage talking points about “death panels” and “socialism,” and wait for scared people to go berserk.
But as Greg Sargent explained well yesterday, ” We’re a long way from the anti-Obamacare town halls of the magical Summer of ’09.” The public is starting to get a better sense of the benefits of the law, how it will help them and their families, and town-hall meetings that used to serve as opportunities to feed red meat to Fox viewers are suddenly becoming opportunities for mainstream Americans to ask Republican lawmakers aloud, “Why should my family suffer because you have a partisan axe to grind?”
Also note just how few answers GOP lawmakers have in response.
For the right, Republicans are eager to boast about voting to repeal the federal health care law several dozen times, but conservatives are unimpressed — the votes were a vanity exercise with no practical value for anyone on either side of the argument.
For the left, Republicans, as we see with Joe Heck in the above video, have tired cliches and shallow talking points about the number of pages in the legislation.
And for everyone in between, as we’ve seen in Nevada, Kentucky, and North Carolina, Republicans offer reassurances that there are some provisions in “Obamacare” that the GOP likes and wants to keep, which makes it that much more difficult to understand why those same Republicans have voted literally dozens of times to eliminate the Affordable Care Act in its entirety — including the parts they now say they support.
All the while, Republicans have said for nearly four years they’re ready to present a credible alternative to the reform law that’ll work even better than that darned Democratic version, but we’re still waiting, and by all appearances, the party still doesn’t have an actual health care policy.
Can’t anybody here play this game?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 20, 2013
“Petulant Little Children”: Why The Republican Obamacare “No Strategy At All” Strategy Fell Apart
After President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, conservative writer David Frum, who had been a speechwriter for George W. Bush, chided his compatriots for the strategy they had employed in opposing it. Had they worked with Obama on a compromise, he argued, the result could have been a more conservative version of the law; by simply opposing it in its entirety, they wound up with nothing once the law passed. For raising this criticism, Frum was declared a traitor and banished from the conservative movement; these days his (still conservative) ideas get a better hearing on the left than the right.
And what has been the Republican strategy on health-care reform since the ACA’s passage? Well, first they tried to kill it through the courts. That didn’t work, though they won for Republican governors the right to refuse the Medicaid dollars that would enable them to offer insurance to their states’ poor (congrats on that), though many of them are coming around to accept the money. In the one house of Congress they control, they’ve held dozens of symbolic repeal votes, so many that it’s become a national joke. They’re now threatening to shut down the government (very bad) or default on America’s debts (even worse) unless Obama agrees to shut the law down, a plan even many within their own party realize is insane. So they’ve ended up looking like petulant children who don’t know when they’ve lost, not to mention viciously cruel ideologues who would literally rather see people go without health insurance than allow them to get it through a system tainted in any way by contact with a law with Barack Obama’s signature on it.
So once again, they’re not getting what they want substantively, and they’re losing politically as well. Even Newt Gingrich—Newt Gingrich!—is criticizing them for not bothering to come up with the “replace” part of “repeal and replace.” Why didn’t they? It’s partly because, as I’ve argued before, the whole topic of health-care reform is something they just don’t care about. But Ed Kilgore adds an important insight: their stance of opposition to every single component of what is a pretty conservative reform plan not only left them defending the status quo, but has pushed them step by step so far to the right that they’ve now reached a point where they’ve almost rejected the very idea of insurance. They’re attacking Obamacare on the grounds that healthy people will have to buy insurance, but might not use it as much as sick people, even going so far as to encourage young people to stay uninsured. But that’s how insurance works! Is it a “bad deal” for many healthy young people? Absolutely, just like car insurance is a bad deal for people who never get into an accident, and homeowner’s insurance is a bad deal for people whose houses never burn down. You don’t have to be a health-care wonk to hear them saying these things and say, “Geez, these people are nuts.”
The real problem is that, as usually happens in a complex political world, the Republican “strategy” to oppose Obamacare was no strategy at all. It was a bunch of ad-hoc decisions, based on a mixture of reason, ill-informed judgment and emotion, made by people not necessarily working together, over an extended period of time. And now it’s falling apart.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 20, 2013
“G.O.P. Purity Control”: The Right Wing Is Back To Denouncing Every Utterance That Strays From Absolute Rigid Orthodoxy
After losing the 2012 election the G.O.P. engaged in a bit of soul-searching, and talked publicly about changing their image, if not their policies. That phase is definitively over. The Republicans are back to denouncing every utterance that strays from an absolutely rigid right-wing orthodoxy, and even ones that really don’t.
Take, for example, the agonies of Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader who is running for re-election in Kentucky. He is far to the right on every issue and was at the forefront of the stonewall opposition to President Barack Obama that has paralyzed Congress. And yet a right-wing group has announced its intention to run ads against him ahead of the 2014 primary, where he faces a Tea Party challenger.
Mr. McConnell, in their estimation, has failed to oppose health care reform with sufficient vehemence. Just last week, he had the temerity to point out that shutting down the government will not actually stop reform from going into effect. As if that was not appalling enough, Mr. McConnell admitted that “there are handful of things in the 2,700-page” health care bill “that are probably are OK.”
Mr. McConnell went on to say that the bill was the “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last 50 years” and that “we need to get rid of it.” But what he actually said or where he actually stands seems to make no difference to Republicans out there on the Tea Party fringe.
At least Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, might sympathize with Mr. McConnell’s plight. It was widely reported last week that he called Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign talk of “self-deportation” by illegal immigrants “racist.” Actually he said that the discussion “hurts us.” In the gap between the comment and the clarification, there was a blizzard of outrage on the right wing corners of Twitter and the rest of the Web.
In another sign of the intense pressure on Republicans to prove their bona fides, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas on Sunday released evidence indicating that he is really and truly American. I mean he gave the Dallas Morning News his birth certificate proving that he is a “natural born American” — and therefore eligible to run for president. Mr. Cruz was born in Canada (not quite Kenya, but definitely not the U.S. of A.). But his mother was an American citizen, meaning he never had to go through a naturalization exercise.
How bizarre that Mr. Cruz felt he had to do this. Of course, the way the Republicans are going, by 2016 merely having lived in the socialist haven north of this country will probably be enough to knock him out of contention.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The New York Times, August 19, 2013
“One Reform, Indivisible”: Republicans Who Deluded Supporters Into Believing Obamacare Wouldn’t Happen Will Pay Personal Price
Recent political reporting suggests that Republican leaders are in a state of high anxiety, trapped between an angry base that still views Obamacare as the moral equivalent of slavery and the reality that health reform is the law of the land and is going to happen.
But those leaders don’t deserve any sympathy. For one thing, that irrational base is a Frankenstein monster of their own creation. Beyond that, everything I’ve seen indicates that members of the Republican elite still don’t get the basics of health reform — and that this lack of understanding is in the process of turning into a major political liability.
On the unstoppability of Obamacare: We have this system in which Congress passes laws, the president signs them, and then they go into effect. The Affordable Care Act went through this process, and there is no legitimate way for Republicans to stop it.
Is there an illegitimate way? Well, the G.O.P. can try blackmail, either by threatening to shut down the government or, an even more extreme tactic, threatening not to raise the debt limit, which would force the United States government into default and risk financial chaos. And Republicans did somewhat successfully blackmail President Obama back in 2011.
However, that was then. They faced a president on the ropes after a stinging defeat in the midterm election, not a president triumphantly re-elected. Furthermore, even in 2011 Mr. Obama wouldn’t give ground on the essentials of health care reform, the signature achievement of his presidency. There’s no way he would undermine the reform at this late date.
Republican leaders seem to get this, even if the base doesn’t. What they don’t seem to get, however, is the integral nature of the reform. So let me help out by explaining, one more time, why Obamacare looks the way it does.
Start with the goal that almost everyone at least pretends to support: giving Americans with pre-existing medical conditions access to health insurance. Governments can, if they choose, require that insurance companies issue policies without regard to an individual’s medical history, “community rating,” and some states, including New York, have done just that. But we know what happens next: many healthy people don’t buy insurance, leaving a relatively bad risk pool, leading to high premiums that drive out even more healthy people.
To avoid this downward spiral, you need to induce healthy Americans to buy in; hence, the individual mandate, with a penalty for those who don’t purchase insurance. Finally, since buying insurance could be a hardship for lower-income Americans, you need subsidies to make insurance affordable for all.
So there you have it: health reform is a three-legged stool resting on community rating, individual mandates and subsidies. It requires all three legs.
But wait — hasn’t the administration delayed the employer mandate, which requires that large firms provide insurance to their employees? Yes, it has, and Republicans are trying to make it sound as if the employer mandate and the individual mandate are comparable. Some of them even seem to think that they can bully Mr. Obama into delaying the individual mandate too. But the individual mandate is an essential piece of the reform, which can’t and won’t be bargained away, while the employer mandate is a fairly minor add-on that arguably shouldn’t have been in the law to begin with.
I guess that after all the years of vilification it was predictable that Republican leaders would still fail to understand the principles behind health reform and that this would hamper their ability to craft an effective political response as the reform’s implementation draws near. But their rudest shock is yet to come. You see, this thing isn’t going to be the often-predicted “train wreck.” On the contrary, it’s going to work.
Oh, there will be problems, especially in states where Republican governors and legislators are doing all they can to sabotage the implementation. But the basic thrust of Obamacare is, as I’ve just explained, coherent and even fairly simple. Moreover, all the early indications are that the law will, in fact, give millions of Americans who currently lack access to health insurance the coverage they need, while giving millions more a big break in their health care costs. And because so many people will see clear benefits, health reform will prove irreversible.
This achievement will represent a huge defeat for the conservative agenda of weakening the safety net. And Republicans who deluded their supporters into believing that none of this would happen will probably pay a large personal price. But as I said, they have nobody but themselves to blame.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 18, 2013
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