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Obama Reveals How A Future GOP President Can Gut ObamaCare

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606x404-2efe36e30370e6ba74d76342f78fc799I owe Mitt Romney an apology. During the 2012 Republican presidential primary season, I repeatedly criticized Romney — and personally challenged him during his editorial board meeting with the Washington Examiner — for promising that if elected, on day one of his presidency, he would grant Obamacare waivers to all 50 states.

As I reported, under the text of the law, the ability to offer waivers to states was subject to many restrictions and wouldn’t even be an option until 2017, four years after his hypothetical swearing in.

Though I still believe I was right about what the statute said, as it turns out, I was being old-fashioned by taking the letter of the law so literally.

Having watched President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius over the past several months unilaterally alter or outright ignore major portions of the law, I now believe that a future Republican president would have greater latitude to gut Obamacare than I once thought possible.

The changes instituted by the Obama administration in response to implementation snags have ranged from perfectly legal areas of administrative discretion stemming from the vast regulatory powers granted to the HHS secretary under Obamacare, to more creative interpretations of that discretion, to Obama simply choosing to ignore parts of the law that became inconvenient.

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Generic Vote Shaping Up to Be Like 2010 Again for GOP

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

One interesting, but not always precisely reliable, measure of partisan preference is what pollsters call the generic vote — which party’s candidates people would vote for in elections to the House of Representatives. Over the past two decades, responses have tended to underpredict Republicans’ performance in subsequent elections, though that was the case more in 1992-2002 than recently.

The last two months have seen sharp shifts in the generic vote, as National Journal’s Charlie Cook notes, with Democrats peaking during the government shutdown in the first half of October and then a sharp swing to Republicans after the spotlight shifted to the Obamacare rollout. (The Huffington Pollster provides a vivid graphic on this.)

The current RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows Republicans leading Democrats 43 percent to 41 percent (they actually put it at 43.5 percent to 41 percent, but I prefer to round off to integer percentages and always round the .5 percentages down). I went back to RealClearPolitics’ 2010 figures to see how they compared.

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Obama Blames Republicans for ObamaCare’s Rollout Woes

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President Obama on Tuesday sought to redirect some of the political blame for the botched rollout of the federal health insurance exchange to Republicans, characterizing GOP lawmakers as rooting for the law’s failure.

Addressing a gathering of business executives, Obama acknowledged that the health-care rollout “has been rough, to say the least,” and he lamented the government’s archaic information-technology procurement system.

Obama said that fixes to the HealthCare.gov Web portal are underway and that the exchange will function for a majority of people by the end of November. But the president said staunch opposition from congressional Republicans is inhibiting the law’s implementation.

“One of the problems we’ve had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure,” Obama said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting in Washington. “We obviously are going to have to remarket and rebrand, and that will be challenging in this political environment.”

The president also voiced frustration with the toxic political atmosphere endangering his signature legislative achievement. He said Washington needs to “break through the stubborn cycle of crisis politics and start working together.”

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Senate Republicans Pushing for Federal Ban on 20-Week Abortions

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Photo Credit: APSenate Republicans, led by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, are pushing for a federal ban on abortions after the end of the 20th week of pregnancy.

Graham is expected to introduce the bill this upcoming week, reports The Washington Examiner, and the legislation will be a companion bill for the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, passed in the House earlier this year.

The planned legislation, though, will face many challenges, not only from the Democratic-controlled Senate, but from some Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee, Utah, who has concerns about Congress’ authority to regulate commerce as the law’s basis.

Back in 2003, a partial-birth abortion plan based on the Commerce Clause was upheld by the Supreme Court, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia emphasising that the “court’s abortion jurisprudence has no basis in the Constitution.”

Graham is up for re-election in South Carolina next year, so his push on the late-term abortion ban may help him fight challengers in the Republican primary. He holds the lead by 51 percent, according to current surveys, but several conservative groups, including the Senate Conservatives Fund, for one, have in an effort to oust the veteran senator.

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Ted Cruz to Iowa Republicans: This Fight is ‘Path to Victory’

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreRepublican Senator Ted Cruz, who incited a standoff over Obamacare culminating in a 16-day U.S. government shutdown, told party activists in Iowa that fighting the health law will pay dividends in the 2014 midterm elections.

The junior senator from Texas, just nine months in office, won a warm reception during a 45-minute speech last night in which he said that his attempt to defund President Barack Obama’s signature health-care program has made a difference, even if it has cost his party in the polls.

“Collectively, we accomplished a great deal,” Cruz told about 600 Republican activists at a downtown convention hall in Des Moines. “We elevated the national debate over what a disaster, what a train-wreck, how much Obamacare is hurting millions of Americans.”

He told the party faithful the prescription for unifying the GOP in the wake of the bitter congressional battle that triggered the shutdown was to ignore both the media and Washington strategists.

“This fight is worth it,” he said. “It is the path to victory.”

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A War That Might Happen

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Photo Credit: National Review Conservatives with long memories had to laugh at the recent New York Times front-page headline: “Fiscal Crisis Sounds the Charge in GOP’s ‘Civil War.’”

That diagnosis largely hangs on the judgment of 1970s New Right direct-mail impresario Richard Viguerie, whose ears have been ringing with the thunder of Fort Sumter for a quarter-century.

Within a week of Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration, Viguerie was denouncing the Gipper as a traitor to the cause. The Associated Press ran a story headlined “Conservatives Angry with Reagan.” Viguerie was the centerpiece: “Almost every conservative I have talked to in the last two months has been disappointed in the initial appointments to the Reagan Cabinet.”

By July of that year, the Washington Post ran a news story, “For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over,” which included many anti-Reagan barbs. After the 1990 midterms, Viguerie told USA Today, “You just heard the opening shots of a civil war within the Republican Party.”

Then again, just because Viguerie is predicting something doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’ve always loved the story of the British intelligence officer whose career spanned the first half of the 20th century: “Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice.”

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The Tea-Party Plan to Delay/Defund Obamacare Was Not Only More Realistic, It Was More Compassionate

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Photo Credit: APOne of the more irritating aspects of the recent government-shutdown unpleasantness has been the “I told you so” lamentations of the defund/delay plan’s critics — as if they had anything approaching a workable alternative. I highly recommend Andrew McCarthy’s weekend column. It’s a devastating takedown of the notion that Obamacare repeal is just a multi-election Republican winning spree away. Even if we were able to achieve a Republican perfect storm, sweeping the Senate in 2014 then taking the White House in 2016, does anyone foresee a filibuster-proof Republican senate majority? Isn’t the best-case outcome of that strategy a tweaking of the law not unlike, say, welfare reforms in the 1990s — positive changes that still leave intact a trillion-dollar-per-year, failed entitlement superstructure?

As Mr. McCarthy notes, the tea-party plan was a Hail Mary pass, but those sometimes work. I will note, however, that unlike in every football game I’ve ever watched, in this case members of the offense actually joined the defense in batting down the pass.

Not only did the tea-party plan have a chance, it was far less cynical and far more compassionate than the Republican alternative. The Republican alternative to the tea-party plan boils down to this: Let the people suffer (also called ”let Obamacare implode”), then they’ll come to us, we’ll win a bunch of elections over several cycles, then we’ll make it better.

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Zombie Republicans

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Photo Credit: The American Spectator Staggering, without direction, not quite dead and in search of brains, the Republican Party is giving a really good performance as the Zombie Party. According to the media’s current narrative, it has to rid itself of the Tea Party’s influence or die.

That narrative tells us the state of the Party is entirely the fault of conservatives, Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee in particular. They — with Cruz’s filibuster — led Republicans into a battle they couldn’t win. If only the House Republicans had gone along with the strategy of the Republican Establishment, they’d have come out of the latest round of crises stronger than they’ve been since, well, we’re not sure when.

If conservatives had obeyed their betters, there would be a chicken in every driveway and a piece of Ted Cruz in every pot. Or at least that’s what the media narrative — propelled by the Republican establishment and the Dems — would have us believe.

There are a few problems with that narrative. To dissect it, we need to be energetic in a way we can only feel if we’re really angry. Anger and frustration are permitted here. Whining is not. And context is important.

The context of the current round of crises — and the temporary solution to them — is that President Obama has never yet been compelled to compromise. Not on Obamacare, not on tax rates, not on individual budgetary items or overall spending. Heaven forbid that any government spending be limited. On none of those things will Obama bargain. He simply won’t negotiate any compromise, so Republicans have spent the past two years trying to find a way to force him to negotiate with them.

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Cruz: Blame Senate GOP for ACA Defeat

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreSen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is blaming his fellow Senate Republicans for opposing a movement in the House to defund ObamaCare, which ultimately caused Republicans to win few concessions in the deal to reopen the government and raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

In an interview with the National Review posted on Saturday afternoon, the senator said that there would be “consequences” for supporting the funding bill.

“Unfortunately, rather than supporting House Republicans, a significant number of Senate Republicans actively, aggressively, and vocally led the effort to defeat House Republicans, to defeat the effort to defund Obamacare,” he told the conservative magazine. “Once Senate Republicans did that, it crippled the chances of this effort, and it caused the lousy deal.”

Late on Wednesday, the Senate voted 81-18 to restore government funding until Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.

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The Case for GOP Optimism

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Photo Credit: National Review The shutdown is over, and the Democrats have won. Now, we will be told incessantly about the damage that was done to the Republican party, about the insurrectionist “fever” that the president masterfully succeeded in “breaking,” and about the free hand that the White House has to implement Obamacare, its central achievement.

All of this is to be expected, but it is not necessarily to be taken seriously. Given the romantic and unrealistic goals that it established at the outset — and the calamitous absence of anything approaching a strategy throughout — the Republican party can certainly have been said to have “lost” the shutdown. And yet this was a loss that was marked not by any serious policy concessions but by the maintenance of the status quo. The president succeeded in ensuring that his side did not lose anything it wanted, yes. But as Dan Meyer, Newt Gingrich’s former chief of staff, observes, he also “didn’t get more revenue. He didn’t get the sequester caps lifted. All those decisions were punted.”

Punted to less promising ground for the Democratic party, too.

Whether or not the national media will elect to focus on the Obamacare rollout mess now that it cannot claim to be distracted by the shutdown will, in truth, be largely irrelevant going forward. Up and down the country, local newspapers are telling brutal stories of breathtaking technical incompetence and of genuine sticker shock. The national papers can continue to append to objective criticisms the usual “Republicans say . . . ” but it is pretty clear to all but the truest of believers that the administration’s promises are in tatters and that its critics are starting to look happily prescient. The media are corrupt; but they’re not corrupt enough to hide the debacle.

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