Putting words in our mouths

If you are wary of politicians telling you how you should feel about Obamacare and the government shutdown, you are not alone. Republicans in Washington are losing the conversation, and their infighting may signal the death knell if they don’t show some solidarity and move past this most recent debacle toward a more tenable resolution, something more tenable than shutting down the government and defunding a law that’s already on the books.

Happily, as I never tire of pointing out, merely making an assertion doesn’t make said claim true:

In the first hours of the shutdown, the terrain looks very bad for Republicans. It’s amazing how consistent the polls have been about linking a confrontation over the Affordable Care Act to funding of the government. While polls show the public disapproves of the law, it has consistently told pollsters it is not in favor of tying government operations to defunding the health care plan. In addition to theQuinnipiac poll, the polls from CBSCNNCNBCNational Journal, and Kaiser show this. As GOP Sen. Jeff Flake said, Republicans have found the one gambit less popular than Obamacare.

Conservatives would interrupt the conversation here. They didn’t shut the government down over Obamacare—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid shut the government down because he refused to negotiate. This is true; Reid refused to negotiate. But the American public would have to view this confrontation differently for that fact to give the Republicans any leverage. Right now, the public agrees with Democrats: Funding the government and taking apart Obamacare should not be part of the same conversation. How do Republicans change that dynamic? Asserting that Obamacare is not popular hasn’t made a whit of difference. — “Why the Shutdown Looks So Bad for the GOP,” Slate, Oct. 1, 2013

Next up in the health care debate: Let’s defund Medicare

Earlier this week, I mentioned how Paul Krugman called the GOP’s power brokering in Washington “unprecedented” in American politics, but what must be even more astounding as we sit this side of the government shutdown that has already affected national parks, the Statue of Liberty site, 800,000 jobs and more, is the fact that House Republicans have held the government hostage on a disagreement about a health care act, Obamacare, that is already on the books.

If the Affordable Care Act was just a proposal or an unpassed piece of legislation sitting on someone’s desk, this might not be such a big deal. But here we are talking about current law that is being disputed at the expense of funding the next fiscal year of government. It would be the same if Republicans decided just out of the blue that they no longer want to fund Medicare, and they were determined to block any legislation for funding the general government until Medicare was dismantled. Imagine the blow back from this. Of course, this particular scenario would never happen since the GOP largely depends on the senior demographic for a good majority of its support. Meanwhile, young and minority voters can just fend for themselves and can go straight to the poverty line if they happen to get sick. What do House Republicans care, since most of those votes will go to Democrats anyway? And Republicans wonder why they can’t turn out more of the young vote and why they are becoming more irrelevant with each passing year.

Needless to say, the current maneuvering on the health care bill is a dirty and shameful bit of politicking on the part of Tea Party Republicans, and if it’s not blatantly obvious at this point, Speaker John Boehner has clearly lost control of his own party in the House.