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 And as long as President Obama is alive and serving as President, the law will not be repealed.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.
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