The GOP Perpetual Motion Machine

Steve Benen is right:  the GOP-controlled House knows absolutely that their first order of business come next week, to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, is just so smoke and mirrors.  They have the votes to do it in the House.  It won't get past the Senate, and it certainly won't get past a Presidential veto.  So why do it?

...But there's almost certainly a realization on everyone's part that House Republicans are doing this for show. If passed, their repeal measure can't pass the Senate, and wouldn't overcome a veto. The GOP wants to pursue repeal just so they can say they pursued repeal. This isn't going to be policymaking from responsible, problem-solving lawmakers; this is going to be a public-relations stunt. We can probably expect quite a bit of this over the next two years -- Republicans are great at campaigning, but tend to have trouble governing once the election has come and gone.

But I continue to think there are opportunities here for Democrats. To hear Upton tell it, one of the very first votes House Republicans will cast in the new Congress is raising taxes on small businesses. And adding over a trillion dollars to the debt. And taking away health care coverage for millions. And making seniors pay more for prescription drugs while weakening Medicare. And allowing insurers to discriminate against children with pre-existing conditions.

To be sure, Republicans won't put it this way, but their rhetoric is irrelevant against the reality -- by voting for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, they're voting for the consequences that come with the law's elimination.

If Dems fail to go on the offensive on this, they're missing an opportunity.

No offense, Steve...but Democrats failed to take that opportunity for all of 2010.  As a result it cost them 60 plus seats and control of the House.

What would ever possess you to believe that the Democrats will attack the Republicans on this now?

Republicans are doing the "people's business".  They will try to repeal the ACA again and again.  And they will get away with it because the Democrats will not act, as Steve M. points out.

And that happened not because the law was so awful, but because the Democrats squandered every opportunity to push back against anti-reform propaganda, from the beginning of the effort to pass the law until the present day. So now the Democrats are so far behind that it isn't enough merely to sing the law's praises -- selling this law is like selling a tainted brand, Tylenol after the poisonings or BP after the oil spill.

I'm not saying Democrats should give up. I'm just saying it's a long, long slog. It's a fight that will be won, if it is won, primarily on the basis of emotion, not facts.

Frankly, if Democrats are going to win, they're going to win because of time. Their best hope is to let the law come into effect and say, after some time has passed, "Oh, you like that? That's Obamacare." (Of course, many provisions of the law don't take effect for years.)

On the other hand, there's one potentially huge pitfall for Republicans in their plan to fight the bill a hundred different ways (total repeal efforts, repeal efforts by pieces, defunding efforts, legal challenges): in the next two years, unemployment will still be high, and they'll be the party that seems obsessed with health care rather than the economy and jobs. That was the Democrats' downfall over the last two years; maybe now it will be the Republicans'.

Sure.  But unemployment will be Obama's fault too.  And the Dems won't push back on that, either.  I'm becoming increasingly convinced that we will have to go through four, maybe eight years of complete Republican control before America realizes what it has lost.

Of course by then it will be far, far too late for our country.