Welcome to your Friday open thread. Does it feel like your days are finally getting back to normal yet? I feel like it’s been all election all the time lately. If I never have to read another story on Christine O’Donnell I’ll be a happy woman.
I love it! Doug Hoffman is still playing the spoiler in NY-23. Remember how Doug Hoffman and the Tea Party handed the House seat to the Democrat for the first time in 100 yrs by pushing out insufficiently conservative Dede Scozzafava?
Political fallout continues this week following Republican Matt Doheny’s defeat in the 23rd district House race.
Doheny lost to Democrat Bill Owens by roughly 5 thousand votes.
More than 9 thousand votes went to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, who had dropped out of the race in early October.
Yesterday, Hoffman’s campaign sent out a press release denying that he had played the role of “spoiler.”
He blamed Doheny’s loss on bad decision-making by Republican “party bosses.”
Thanks for giving Democrats the seat, Doug. Twice! That’s some good, deep undercover work there.
Mitch McConnell is already giving speeches saying his top priorities are 1) defeating Barack Obama in 2012 and 2)repealing health care. I guess jobs & the economy are priority #3. Republicans won’t be able to repeal health care reform, for many reasons:
Obama Isn’t Interested in ‘Re-litigating’ Health Care, Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen observes. The president might have said he’s humble in his post-election press conference, but on his signature legislation, he “clearly doesn’t seem inclined to budge on this. If Boehner & Co. think Obama will be pushed around on health care, and that with the right leverage, repeal is an option, they’re mistaken.” Benen adds that Obama is setting up a narrative: “re-fighting the battles of the past is a mistake.” The message is “all Republicans want to do is fight over things that happened in the past, instead of focusing on the future — which may come up quite a bit in the coming months. … [T]he underlying message to Republicans intending to push for some wholesale overhaul seemed to be pretty straightforward: don’t bother.”
Holding Up Confirmations Isn’t Enough, Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall Genzer reports. “The Senate is responsible for confirming the heads of new bureaus and offices established by the health care and financial overhauls. Again, Republicans don’t control the Senate, but they could hold up those confirmation votes. [Business law professor Jennifer] Taub says that’s the reverse of what’s needed. Think of the new laws as children.” Taub explains, “The legislation itself, the code, is like the DNA and we need a combination of both nature and nurture for it to thrive.”
Defunding Health Care Isn’t Really an Option, Either, The Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky explains. Boehner and Newt Gingrich have come out in favor of this option, but “that may be easier said than done. As former Senator Tom Daschle explained in a recent interview, ‘a lot of what we did in health care reform has more of an entitlement than a discretionary funding base. So as an entitlement, they would really have to change the law rather than simply not fund in order for it to be effected. The entitlement sections of the legislation are going to be fairly immune from defunding.’ The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that there is ‘at least $50 billion in specified and estimated authorizations of discretionary spending that might be involved in implementing that legislation’ and presumably that’s the spending Republicans can more easily de-fund.”
And GOP Interest Group Allies Love It, Steve Pizer and Austin Frakt argue at The Incidental Economist. “The Republican base hates health reform because it’s a symbol of Obama. They think it’s a product of the far left, when in fact it’s chock full of Republican ideas. … When the new Republican House majority starts legislating on health care, they will be more concerned with what the relevant interest groups want. The insurance industry, hospitals, and drug companies want looser regulation and lower taxes. That is, the big players want what they always want–more control over implementation and establishment of favorable regulations–even if it’s at the expense of a more efficient health system for the rest of us. But they also want the mandate, which can’t work without the subsidies and insurance reforms. The [Affordable Care Act] began as a moderate Republican reform proposal for a reason: with respect to the fundamental structure of the law, the interest group politics work pretty well. We doubt the House leadership will do anything to alienate the insurers, drug companies, or hospitals. Put it this way, if those interest groups didn’t want health reform of the form we got, they would have killed it last winter, if not before. They didn’t. So the mandate and overall structure of the ACA are safe.”
National Republicans will have to put on a show about it because it’s what their base expects. How do you think they’ll fare when they lose this battle? Will the teabaggers move on or will they keep cannibalizing themselves. The fight might move to the states because Republicans control more state legislatures now but it could also start hurting the people who are beginning to be helped by the law. I’m not sure how well that will go over.