While of course you’re right that the GOP has seized on “Obamacare” for explicitly partisan purposes, there was no attempt whatsoever by the Dems to officially title the ACA in such a way as to highlight its Republican roots. Dems just don’t think that way, for better or worse.
They won’t fix O-care. But here’s what they could do. If the SCOTUS hacks have their way and invalidate the subsidies, the GOP could tweak O-care to include the fix, and at that point take ownership of it. The media won’t call them out on it, and the average person won’t know the difference. The GOP can now claim that they got rid of the hated O-care and replaced it with something better. True? No way. But since when has the GOP cared about truth?
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Oh, there’s zero chance that Alito won’t buy into the Moops argument, mainly for the hooks Scalia will latch onto. Expect Scalia to go sarc at some very narrow point, but he’s written too much over his years at SCOTUS to be able to publish anything on this as his own overall take or pointed dissent. The hardest, most stubborn, closed-ears closed-eyes adoption of the Moops argument will come in under an Alito-Thomas label, with Scalia adopting with zero separate contribution, and a lot of approval in the separate one from Roberts-Kennedy.
And those 5 in combination will effectively have starved the 4 lib-Dem dissents of oxygen and leaving them raging against their stranglers.
Hey Dan Dan Dan Dan Coats. Suck Suck Suck Suck my Balls Balls Balls Balls, you fuck fuck fuck fucking maroon!
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He’s a hard high one: Jim Bunning without the ability to throw a baseball.
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I’ve seen that annonymous “aide” quoted in a couple pieces now. I sure hope he/she has many colleagues who are on the same page.
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Well . . . . they are the party of No.
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Thats if they are smart. If.
There are major differences but both share the idea of an individual mandate and use of private insurance to expand access to health care.
A meaningful backlash will only occur if the Democrats take advantage of the situation. And to take advantage of the situation effectively, you can’t just stay silent as a political party until after the damage is done—you have to frame the messaging battle by making it a required talking point for every goddamn Democrat in the Senate and the House every fucking time they open their mouths in public in a strategically coordinated fashion, with cohesive and easily understood arguments. That should be happening now. This is NOT the same thing as Sherrod Brown or Nancy Pelosi or Liz Warren making random, individual statements to the press that get swallowed up in the blizzard of daily news bites.
The coordination has to involve the White House, the Dem leadership in Congress, and every Democratic governor or major Dem party figure in every goddamn state in the union that’s affected by the Court decision, and should have included a major Dem party summit in D.C. with all these people in attendance. The climax of this party summit should have been a collective appearance by all these Dems, including the President, with the single primary message being forcefully and unapologetically articulated: the Republican Party is willfully and intentionally trying to deprive American citizens of affordable health care, that many of these citizens will be sickened, bankrupted and ruined as a result of this Republican effort, and the Democratic Party is going to fight that effort tooth and nail.
Yes, I’m dreaming. I’ll shut up now, and yield the floor to FoxNews, Chuck Todd, David Brooks, and George Stephanopolous to talk about why Dictator Obama won’t cooperate with the GOP to gut the ACA.
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Dream on. It’s a done deal. Roberts isn’t going to risk further backlash from the Koch Brothers. This court WILL vote 5-4 to kill the subsides. Scalia will write the opinion saying that Health Care is a privilege and not a right. Republicans will do nothing to fix the law and they will have their pals in the Corporate Controlled Conservative Press beat the “Obama took your health care away” drum. The ACA will collapse.
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The democratic party need to shout, “Single Payer,” as a fix to the state exchanges. The republican’ts will more than hate it and the insurance industry will freak out. The republicans would be forced to fix the language allowing for states to use the federal exchange.
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[quote=“josephebacon, post:31, topic:16159”]
“Obama took your health care away”[/quote]
Somewhere in the bowels of the RNC, Reince Priebus and Mitch McConnell and their minions have already prepared their battle plan of propaganda based specifically on this idea. Five minutes after the Court rules against the ACA, the GOP will start its messaging blizzard of “Obama took your health care away” in close coordination with Fox, Limbaugh, Brooks, and the other Kochian fellow travelers. NPR will flutter its hands nervously and refuse to criticize the Republicans, Democrats will whine and point fingers at each other, Obama will conduct a glum press conference assuring the country that he’s eager to work with the Republican Party leadership, and John Boehner will have two double Manhattans in celebration. Public opinion polls conducted the week after the decision will show that a solid majority of the country blames Obama for taking their health care away, with the bonus being that they also fear that Obama will take their Social Security away as well.
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Many of these state legislatures are controlled by conservative Republicans from safely Republican districts and they won’t want to go on record as having “voted for Obamacare.”
“It’s an opportunity that we’ve failed at for two decades. We’ve not
been particularly close to being on the same page on this subject for
two decades,” a congressional Republican health policy aide told TPM.
“So this idea — we’re ready to go? Actually no, we’re not.”
Wow, a GOP aide who’s actually honest! Yes the repubs have failed at health care. And they don’t have a plan, very deliberately, if the ACA is gutted. They don’t care if health care or health insurance is unaffordable. THEY DON’T SEE A REASON TO FIX IT.
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Easy to be honest when you only speak on the condition of anonymity.
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You can call the roberts conservatives on the court and register you support for PPACA…Loudly and often…
1.202.479.3211 or 1.202.479.3000
They will not relish the idea of 11 MILLION Americans plus their families on their doorstep at home or at the Court!
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And this time Republicans will actually have something of a case. Whether it was sloppiness in writing the law or naivete in assuming that all states would create their own exchanges and/or that courts would “know what they meant,” Democrats in Congress screwed up here.
When you’re dealing with the most important piece of legislation of your presidency, you don’t leave ANYTHING to chance. You make sure absolutely every I is dotted and every T is crossed.
Courts are not supposed to rule based on popular opinion. They’re supposed to rule based on what the law says vis a vis the facts of the case.
Hopefully J. Roberts is looking at these types of comments coming from GOP members of congress while asking him to give them an opportunity to fix it. He needs to worry about the legacy of his court.