President Obama was in the Capitol Building pleading his Syrian case to a bipartisan group of Senators. Outside, a Republican Congressman led a crowd of hundreds as they chanted "No! No! No!" at the Capitol walls. But the crowd wasn't upset about Syria, and the Congressman wasn't afraid what might happen if the US stumbled into another middle eastern civil war. He was afraid of what's already happening to America... thanks to Obamacare.
The Congressman was Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and he was one of a battery of conservatives speaking (and chanting and yelling) about the effort to defund Obamacare at the Exempt America rally. It was the biggest blip in a series of mostly under-the-radar events today concerning the health care overhaul and Republican efforts to undo it.
For months a conservative block of lawmakers, spearheaded by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, have been trying desperately to tie the future of the Affordable Care Act to a necessary funding bill that needs to be renewed at the end of the month. Their plan is to pass a bill (called the Continuing Resolution) that will fund the government for the next year , but to explicitly deny the use of any funds for the implementation of Obamacare in that bill. The President will then be in the awkward position of either vetoing the funding bill and "causing" a government shut down, or pulling the legs out from under his own toppling health care law.
The plan was a long shot to begin with, and after today is seems shot all to hell.
The House leadership has long shied away from the "defund Obamacare" movement within its ranks. Today at a GOP Conference meeting, Eric Cantor unveiled the official roadmap to passing a new Continuing Resolution. It essentially gives a nod to the defund plan without taking it very seriously at all. The procedure is complicated, but the outcome is all but certain.
The Republican controlled house passes a CR, plus a little addition saying that Obamacare can't be funded. The Senate has to (maybe) vote on the little addition first before they can see the CR. Since they're Democrat controlled, they won't pass it. Then they get the "clean" CR, which they pass. The President signs that version and both the government and the Affordable Care Act implementation get funding for the next year.
Republicans insist that having Democratic Senators conclusively on the record with pro-"fund Obamacare" votes will be damaging to the Democrats come next election cycle. I guess that's working under the assumption that the law will implode. Other than that, I can't see any real effort to get rid of the ACA in this plan.
The "defund" crowd agrees with me and they're real angry about it. There was nearly as many fightin' words directed at GOP leadership as at the President during the afternoon's Exempt American rally, which started a couple of hours after Cantor revealed his plan. Brent Bozell, Chairman of For America, said "It's a gimmick... They should be ashamed of themselves." Rep. Matt Salmon of Arizona declared "No more sissies! No more wimps!" in Congress.
A rapid-fire series of speakers echoed largely the same sentiment. They were in a war (Michelle Bachman explained the Battle of the Bulge in her speech), they need to show backbone, or spine, or vertebrae to win the war, and they needed the American people to be that backbone.
That last point is an important part of the plan. Both Rand Paul and Ted Cruz came dangerously close to admitting just how desperate this plan now seems to be. Cruz said, "If the traditional rules of Washington apply, we can't win.... No elected politician in Washington can win this fight. Only you can win this fight."
While the conservatives are making a last ditch effort to set the grassroots on fire, however, the Democrats are proving how little the roots care. While Cantor was handing out the defund-headfake memo, a group of four Democratic lawmakers held a press conference to "denounce the efforts of Republicans to sabotage this law."
In contrast to the Exempt America rally, where one minor speaker called Obama's promises about insurance coverage "bullshit," the strongest language from the Democrats came from Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, who compared repeated efforts to repeal the ACA to the movie Groundhog Day and told Republicans to "get over it."
When they opened the floor for questions after Rep. Jan Schakowsky's final speech, nobody had any. It seems the audience had indeed gotten over it. With the whole world in a tizzy over Syria for the foreseeable future, Cruz and the defunders may have trouble finding anyone who isn't.