Thursday Open Thread 9.19.13

So Speaker… and I use that term loosely … Boehner decided this week to have the Republican Party commit suicide. Unfortunately, the suicide plan is to have the country drive towards a cliff and jump off. And since he is the driver and we are all his passengers, and the doors are locked, we have to go with him. So it is more of a non-mutual murder-suicide pact. The government, much of it anyway, will run out of money at the end of the month when the new fiscal year (October 1) starts. Eighteen days after that, the government will run out of borrowing authority when the debt ceiling is reached. So Speaker Boehner had a choice: he could have passed continuing resolutions to fund the government at last year’s budget levels for a certain period of time and have that pass the House with Democratic and Republican votes, as he has done before. Or he could surrender to the fringe tea party caucus in the House and demand that any continuing resolution and any debt ceiling increase be paired with a repeal or defunding of Obamacare.

This demand is insane and ignorant. It shows how mind blowingly stupid Teabagger Republicans are. For the funding of the Affordable Care Act is pretty much already taken care of when the original law was passed. Indeed, you will have to repeal the entire law to defund it. And as long as President Obama is alive and serving as President, the law will not be repealed. A government shutdown will not stop it. The money has already been spent and insurance premiums are already plunging across the country, meaning that the law is already paying for itself.

The Teabaggers, including Jim DeMint and Steven King and Ted Cruz, are all operating under the assumption that the President will cave and repeal his own law. Their entire plan is predicated on that assumption. And that might be a good, thought still very risky, assumption if Obamacare polled badly and the public wanted the Republicans to do everything they can to repeal or defund it. But that is not the case. Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog:

A few weeks ago, Jason Cherkis reported a fascinating anecdote from the Kentucky State Fair a few weeks ago, noting a “middle-aged man in a red golf shirt” who shuffled up to a small folding table to hear about state’s health benefit exchange established by the Affordable Care Act. The man was impressed with what he heard, telling one of the workers behind the table, “This beats Obamacare I hope.”

The man likes the Affordable Care Act. He just didn’t know it.

The story came to mind yesterday looking over the new Obamacare polls from NBC/Wall Street Journal and the Pew Research Center, both of which reinforced the larger trends — the health care reform law remains largely unpopular, even as implementation continues apace. The reason everyone should take the results with a grain of salt, though, has to do with the middle-aged man in a red golf shirt — most Americans still have no idea what Obamacare is.

And when they are informed of what Obamacare actually is, i.e. forcing insurance companies to insure everyone with preexisting conditions, prohibiting them from establishing illness or lifetime caps, forcing them to use 80% of their profits for patient care and illness prevention rather than bonuses and other administrative issues, and establishing healthcare exchanges to drive down costs through market pressure, and then giving those who need it subsidies to buy insurance from those exchanges,… they actually like it.

And even if they didn’t, 69% of Americans oppose Republican efforts to block or sabotage the bill, a number that will only grow once the Republicans shut down the government.

The Pew poll, for example, asked Americans whether they approve or disapprove of the Affordable Care Act. A 42% minority supports the law. But respondents opposed to Obamacare were pressed further and Pew found that only 23% of the public believes officials “should do what they can to make the law fail.”

In other words, less than a fourth of the public endorses the Republican Party’s position on health care.

Greg Sargent delved deeper into the Pew numbers:

I asked Pew for a fuller breakdown of the numbers, and the firm sent me new data that illustrates just how extreme a position (the sabotage position) this really is. However, the data also illustrates in a new way why GOP officials feel under such pressure to continue trying to undermine the law — it all has to do with who votes in GOP primaries. […]

The “make Obamacare fail” position is a minority preoccupation that is driven largely by Tea Party Republicans and has very little support even among independents — including fewer than half of those independents who oppose the law. Yet it’s exerting an enormous influence over the GOP’s posture heading into this fall’s fiscal fights, and by contrast, over our political situation in general and potentially over the fate of the economy.

So there we are, the GOP in the House has decided to commit suicide. A government shutdown will turn everyone against them. Even Karl Fucking Rove agrees with that.

“A shutdown now would have much worse fallout than the one in 1995. Back then, seven of the government’s 13 appropriations bills had been signed into law, including the two that funded the military. So most of the government was untouched by the shutdown. Many of the unfunded agencies kept operating at a reduced level for the shutdown’s three weeks by using funds from past fiscal years.”

“But this time, no appropriations bills have been signed into law, so no discretionary spending is in place for any part of the federal government. Washington won’t be able to pay military families or any other federal employee. While conscientious FBI and Border Patrol agents, prison guards, air-traffic controllers and other federal employees may keep showing up for work, they won’t get paychecks, just IOUs.”

“Going down that road would strengthen the president while alienating independents. It is an ill-conceived tactic, and Republicans should reject it.”

NEW HAMPSHIRE–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY–PPP: Rand Paul 20, Chris Christie 19, Jeb Bush 14, Kelly Ayotte 12, Ted Cruz 10, Marco Rubio 7, Paul Ryan 7, Bobby Jindal 3, Rick Santorum 2.

LOL. Christie needs to pray Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Kelly Ayotte and Paul Ryan don’t run, so he can consolidate as much as the relatively sane vote as possible. Otherwise, Paul or Cruz is going to beat him.