Discussion for article #232428
Coulda stopped the headline after five words.
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Since the launch of Obamacare, the GOP mantra has been repeal and replace.
But the plain fact is that for most in the far right wing of the party, their mantra has always been repeal.
They just hate it…viscerally loathe it, as much because it is a creation of the Obama administration as for anything, and in their hatred, they are painting their party into a very dangerous corner.
I have said before, I pray that the Court is smart enough to render its decision based on the clear evidence of the intent of Congress, but if they do not and the law is trashed as a result, I would argue that the resulting chaos could wind up
truly shattering the GOP. There will be a huge battle between the purists and the pragmatists, while the millions of
their constituents who got coverage and then lost it are confronted with the reality of what killing Obamacare means to them and their families. And the mess will totally consume Congress for most of the session, blowing a hole in what little chance there ever was for the GOP to prove that “it knows how to govern and can get things done.”
Tragically, there are many among that group who now have coverage, but have no idea that it is the result of Obamacare.
In that kind of climate, the opportunity for mischief and mayhem is boundless. There is part of me that wants to see this happen, but I am not sure our democracy can survive it. We live in interesting times.
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A large part of this of course is the inability of Dems to message their accomplishments. I swear if they cured cancer their press release would be, “Liberals may have reduced the number of Oncologists”.
C’mon guys, you can do so much better that this!
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I worry about Kapur’s political savvy. Of course the R’s know what to do when millions are harmed by their maneuvers: prevent them from voting.
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Lamar Alexander says you can keep your Obamacare subsidies.
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Cue the Benny Hill music.
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“…the mayhem…”
You mean, the economic collapse caused by a suddenly-insolvent health care system.
Their only choice will be to tax and fee the middle class to buttress all insurance companies (remember AIG), all hospitals executing a money-losing business model, not to mention the millions of people who would revert to free health care.
When this added expense meets student loan debt and Republicans realize all the nation’s wealth is tied up in aristocrats who can’t be touched and there’s a war to be fought and corporate subsidies to be paid – crash and burn.
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Simple solution-use the same process as is currently being used to address all other issues: Have the President issue an executive order reinstating subsidies and have the Republicans express fake outrage, while secretly being glad that he took the burden to do something off them.
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Good piece, Mr. Kapur. I found it very informative.
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“…the resulting chaos could wind up
truly shattering the GOP.”
If ever there was a group bent on creating and maintaining misery for millions it’s the GOP.
For years I’ve been hearing that this or that will cause the death of the GOP.
It never happens.
Old, dumb, angry white people, white males with less than 2 yrs college, neo-Confederates, gerrymandering and vote suppression will keep the GOP on life support.
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If the Democrats in D.C. had the faintest fucking clue about how to take advantage of the manifold vulnerabilities of Republican policies and beliefs, the GOP might well have something to worry about. The Republican Party has been a target-rich environment for many years, yet the Dems have not once demonstrated the slightest awareness of the necessity of strategic and tactical communications. The most they can muster is a strongly-worded press release or two and the occasional indignant interview on NPR, and then they go back to wringing their hands while wolfing down prime rib at the Capitol Grille.
The Democratic Party still gives no indication that it’s aware of just how toxic the media environment is for it. The GOP has a lavishly-funded 24/7/365 propaganda network known as FoxNews, and combined with radio ranters like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, they have thoroughly cowed and intimidated mainstream broadcast channels like ABC, NBC, and CBS. The networks that once gave us Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and John Chancellor now employ vapid lightweights like Stephanopolous, Todd, and Cokie Roberts, who have all thoroughly assimilated the “both sides do it, so let’s concentrate on the horse race” mentality that defines High Broderism. NPR, the frequent home of David Brooks, the heir to David Broder, is functionally useless. Unless the Dems can manage to establish a meaningful media counterweight to Fox—which they never will—the onus is on them to take over the messaging and communications duties. They should have done that ten years ago, and they haven’t taken even a baby step in that direction.
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The whole concept of ACA is inclusion and removing barriers. The whole GOP is about exclusion and the celebration of barriers. Reconciling those two forces is impossible.
The GOP, as it is currently sailing along, cannot draft a healthcare plan that makes their base feel better than the poors and at the same time helps the poor.
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Somebody please explain this to me: No matter what the SC rules, the next day ACA still is the law of the land. To change it, the president has to agree or Congress has to overcome his veto. Isn’t this a question of what the GOP is ABLE to do in that political context more important than detailing all of these plans? For instance, if the proposal from Congress is to add a version of the exchanges that have no preexisting condition rule–as is suggested above–all Obama has to do is say that he’ll veto it. Remember, this will be during the time that the presidential race is getting serious. Does anyone seriously think the president will bend over backwards to work with a republican Congress to take such an issue away from Hillary? The situation at that point is that the red state Congress will be seen, rightfully, as screwing the lower and middle class citizens of the red states. There will be no other way to portray it. Remember, the democrats are good at presidential politics. In any case, this story is written as if whatever Congress eventually comes up with automatically replaces ACA. It doesn’t.
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At the very first meeting in the White House that Obama held with congressional leaders on health care (2009, that would have been), he sought to bring Republicans into this discussion. They literally had nothing to offer at that meeting–they refused even to participate. No one except Republicans cut Republicans out of the debates that led to the passage of the ACA. Obama told them at the time that a policy of running against anything he proposes is no policy at all, and pretty thin gruel as politics, for that matter. Sooner or later, they’d be asked what they’ve done that makes government work better on behalf of people.
And here they find themselves, reaping the precious little-to-nothing that a politics of opposition has yielded them. As someone upthread said, this would ordinarily be a truly awesome instance of schadenfreude–“Obama told you so!!”–if not for the fact that the GOP’s taking governance seriously for seven years will potentially be devastating for millions of people. This will indeed be a crucial year, and not just for the Republicans.
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The GOP is a tool by which the rich and powerful convince the gullible underclasses that the masses will be better off if the masses are divided and uncooperative, and if the gullible underclasses further enrich the wealthy.
Try drafting a healthcare plan in line with that ethos that also helps the as many people as possible.
That’s the GOP’s problem.
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Constructing solutions is hard. Wrecking stuff is easy.
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Wow, you sure as hell know how to read a trend line, and it pretty well matches the one I see in my head, too.
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No, the party line is that “Obama drafted a bad law and that SCOTUS has the sad job of pointing out that Obama didn’t do his job, and ACA is unworkable. Sigh.”
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The current GOP is the end product of many years of blind irrational rage, mostly created by an agenda-driven media, and the chickens finally coming home to roost now that their “whip the idiots into a seething rage” strategy has actually produced filled Congressional seats and high offices with idiots and/or sociopaths. Obamacare isn’t without its valid criticism, but the GOP never had a viable plan to replace and never will. That was never part of their plan. It was all political. It was just a wedge tool, but they were too stupid to not see past their nose and realize that they may end up actually destroying the ACA. If it goes down and wrecks a few lives and a decent chunk of of the economy, the bloods on their hands. Whether or not that’s well understood has a lot to do with whether or not Democrats can adequately explain it to the populace (unlikely).
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