Ready, Set, Stop
It’s well into summer. The hot spell is over for now and cooler air has settled into Vermont. The flowers are doing well. The bear that visits us occasionally is looking extremely healthy. The birds are singing, and the frogs are enjoying the pond. Oh. And the Republicans are getting desperate.
Really, really desperate.
Their problem is that as the roll out of Obamacare finally gets under way it seems to be, well, working. Not exactly great, but pretty darned good. For the record I still don’t like it, but that’s just me being a purist. I would have preferred a single payer solution, or Medicare for everyone. Judging by the apoplectic fits now convulsing parts of Washington my dream will have to stay on hold. After all it’s the purpose of health care reform to improve health, not cause heart attacks.
It is, however, coming very close to causing hear attacks.
When it was revealed that reform in New York was going to slash the cost of health care insurance by half – some reports suggested two-thirds – the collective groan we all heard was from the Republicans in Congress. The House, under extremist GOP control, has voted nearly forty times to repeal Obamacare. Indeed those repeal votes, none of which matter and all of which consume valuable time better deployed on real problems, are now the way we set our Congressional clocks. Time in Washington is measured by the spaces between each anti-Obama vote held in the House. Whereas time was once accelerating, and whereas it practically stopped a couple of months ago as Congress bickered over immigration, it is now about to pick up again.
So here we go.
Ready, set, stop.
With the stop being yet another fight over the debt limit.
A rational person might be forgiven for thinking we ought to be past these ultimatum driven bouts of brinkmanship. After all the Federal budget is now under control – albeit for the wrong reasons – and so the scary upward trajectory for the debt is now beginning to drop back to earth. Or at least it will as long as we don’t muck things up too much. The fever has broken. The patient is getting better. No one can be pleased with how we all arrived at this relatively happy place, it was all accidental rather than deliberate, but let’s not quibble. Some of us never thought we had a debt problem, but those who, in their error, did must now realize their panic was unnecessary.
The facts don’t lie. We don’t have a budget or debt problem. Not right now at least.
But the Republicans don’t look at facts. They talk amongst themselves. They don’t adjust to the change in our fiscal fortune and tone down their deficit reduction rhetoric because that was never, ever, their issue. It isn’t the government debt that concerns them. It is government itself. They want to cut it. And cut it whether it is doing a good, bad, or an indifferent job. Their goal is not to improve government or make it more cost effective. It is to eliminate it.
You can imagine, therefore, their horror when they realize that Obamacare, that much hated extension of government, is actually a good thing and will help lots and lots of Americans. Nothing could be worse. A government program that works. A government program that voters will love. A government program that does exactly what it set out to do. There is nothing on earth, not even a truckload of Mexicans crossing into Texas, not even a Moslem peace movement, that can destabilize the Republicans the way Obamacare can.
And is.
Yes. These are desperate times for Congressional Republicans. America is about to get a cheaper and more comprehensive health care system.
So. What to do?
Scorched earth. The GOP is going all Leninist. It is going to destroy the economy to save us from ourselves. How noble.
Or at least that’s the plan.
As summer begins to wind its way towards fall we will begin to see the workings of this last ditch strategy. The plan, as we now know it, is to link the debt ceiling to Obamacare. If we want the debt ceiling to be raised, then Obamacre must go.
The first shots have been fired. House Republicans introduced legislation to cut enormous chunks of funding from a series of secondary targets. Environmental protection, national parks, scientific research, new drug approval and other hated symbols of government waste and interference are all on the hit list. No one expects the 29% cut in environmental protection, or in drug approval, to get enacted. The point is to force the Democrats to use up their ammunition defending such horrible things, and to bring into focus that all options to cut the deficit and avoid the need for a debt ceiling increase have been exhausted. Then battle can be joined.
The narrative will go like this: the GOP will say that they will not hold us all hostage if, and only if, Obamacare is shelved. Absent such total capitulation, then they will send us over the cliff, renege on our debts, and create mayhem across the world as our debt is not repaid. Interest rates will hurtle upward, retirees will find their portfolios full of worthless paper, and our economy will implode. For a party that continually prattles on about the need to pander to markets by getting government cut down to size, this is an extraordinary amount of damage to inflict on those markets.
Just because Obamacare works.
It isn’t as if the Republicans have ever come up with their own health care reform. It hasn’t dawned on them to develop one. So they have no plan ‘B’. Just the same old plan ‘A’.
Obstruct, say no, and stop.
And play hostage games over and over again.
Somewhere deep in their bunker, hidden far away from the real world, and receiving only the warped reports of loyalists, the Republican leadership must believe hostage taking is a good plan. Their hysteria is matched only by the fantasy world they appear to inhabit. Both are extreme. Both are contorted. Both are deeply anti-social. Both are so cynical as to be sickening to those of us who are not ensconced alongside them.
What will become of their last ditch histrionics? What will become of us? Who knows.
Ready, set …
