It’s almost time to set the days-since-last-pointless-attempt-to-repeal-Obamacare counter back to zero.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell partnered with hyperconservative Utah Sen. Mike Lee to yesterday pledge to pass an Obamacare repeal through that chamber under a rule called “reconciliation.” That’s a provision that allows the Senate to make federal budgetary changes with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote supermajority which filibuster abuse has made standard in the modern Senate.
There are any number of problems with this approach, starting with the fact that even if Congress passes a repeal it will draw a presidential veto. But I get it, symbolism — fine. Senate Democrats are fighting the move of course, but there are a few reasons why President Barack Obama might even welcome the opportunity to veto a repeal.
[SEE: Political Cartoons on Obamacare]
First, public opinion is slowly but markedly narrowing regarding the Affordable Care Act. A year ago, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, the law suffered from a 16-point approval/disapproval deficit in the public eye, with an average of 39.8 percent approving and 55.8 percent disapproving. That gap has closed to a six-point deficit — 42.5 in favor and 48.5 against — which means the law is still under water but the margin has closed significantly. Hell, three of the last four public polls in Real Clear’s list have found the country to be essentially evenly split (two of the polls showed the law with narrow approval and one with narrow disapproval, but all three were within their surveys’ margins of error, meaning that they were all statistical ties). And approval is a separate question from repeal, which has consistently polled worse than simple disapproval. A Morning Consult poll released this week is illustrative: The law is under water by eight points (43-51) on approve/disapprove, but a clear plurality (36 percent) wants Congress to improve the law, while only 27 percent want repeal. In fact if you add together those who want to improve the law, let it take effect (17 percent) or expand it (15 percent) — all positions antithetical to the standard repeal position — 68 percent want status quo or improvement while 27 percent want repeal. (Tellingly, even among Republicans the “repeal” number has dropped somewhat in the last year while the “expand” number has increased.)
Of course the 27 percent who want repeal are the ones who vote in congressional primaries and call in to conservative talk radio shows — people, in other words, who the congressional leadership is most interested in pleasing.
But the GOP might want to consider that if they actually do send a repeal to Obama’s desk, it will be a new step in the long-tired ritual of casting symbolic repeal votes. People have largely stopped paying attention to the House’s endless repeal votes because been there, done that. This would be the first time that Congress actually passed a repeal, which would require an Obama veto. This would actually grab the public’s attention.
[GALLERY: Barack Obama Cartoons]
If the White House communications team has any sense (admittedly an open question at times over the last six years) they’ll take the opportunity to hammer home two points in a ceremony where the president wields his veto pen with a flourish. First, he could point out the good news ( and the absence of the economic/health care apocalypse the GOP has long predicted) that has presumably propelled the improvement in the law’s poll numbers: The uninsured rate in the country has hit a record low as 17 million people have gained coverage, trends confirmed this week in a Journal of the American Medical Association study which found that, as USA Today put it, “fewer Americans lack health insurance or have trouble getting the care and medicine they need.” Obamacare has many provisions that are widely popular, like being able to keep your children on your health insurance for longer and being able to get affordable coverage whether or not you have a pre-existing condition. Beyond that, the across the board, explosive rate increases conservatives predicted have yet to materialize — Californians’ rates will go up by 4 percent, for example. As the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman argues:
California is only one state, and when you go across the country the picture is complicated — in some states premiums are rising more slowly than they did before the law; in other states they’ve jumped; and in some places they’ve declined. There are many reasons why. But what’s important to understand is that the predictions of the law’s critics — that both overall health spending and premiums would explode — were completely wrong.
He mentions the spending component, which is another problem for the GOP. The Congressional Budget Office reported last month that repealing the law would add $137 billion to the federal deficit. And that’s not some hippie-dippie liberal economist’s view; that’s the organization’s most politically conservative estimate, using “dynamic scoring,” which tries to factor in how changes in tax and spending policy would ripple through the economy. If one were to use the more conservative (in the “traditional” rather than “political” sense) approach of gauging such a change, the figure is $353 billion. So repeal puts the lie once again to the notion that the GOP is concerned about the deficit. (And, not for nothing, reconciliation is only supposed to be used for measures reducing the deficit, so there’s some question about whether it can be used for repeal.)
[SEE: Republican Party Cartoons]
The second point the president could hammer home at a veto event is that while the GOP long ago adopted the formulation “repeal and replace” to describe their approach to the Affordable Care Act — promising both an elimination of the old law and the passage of a new one protecting Obamacare’s popular aspects — the party hasn’t come close to settling on a replacement. This is part of the reason so many GOPers were worried that they might win the King v. Burwell case — they might have been forced to actually do something to fix the problems a victory would have caused. They’ve had five years and haven’t come up with anything; they’re not going to get there in the next few weeks, so any repeal bill will present a clean choice between the status quo and the way it was.
So go ahead, Republicans, make the president’s day.
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Obama Should Relish an Obamacare Repeal Veto Opportunity originally appeared on usnews.com
