Method To The Madness

Orange Julius's stupid stunt suing President Obama for not implementing the ACA employer mandate quickly enough seems not only moronic, but specifically designed to piss everyone off on both the left and the right.  I'm pretty confused about it too as nobody on the right will be happy without Boehner pulling a Mola Ram and ripping Obama's heart out on live TV, and the rest of us are just pretty much disgusted with Boehner's complete loss of control over his asylum patients as they loot the country.

Steve M looks for answers among the insanity and figures Orange Julius has managed to survive this long for a reason (where Cantor after all has not).

So Boehner's announcement that the suit will be just about the employer mandate lands as an intentional damp squib, making the whole thing seem like harmless stunt politics, while the draft resolution enables the House to participate in any Obamacare suit. And I do mean "participate in" -- the language of the resolution says that the House "may initiate or intervene in one or more civil actions on behalf of the House of Representatives" regarding Obamacare. So joining someone else's suit is a distinct possibility (or even joining multiple suits attacking multiple aspects of the law). 

The point is that the legal eagles of the conservative movement are attacking Obamacare from a lot of different angles, any one of which could be the Roberts Court's way of finally killing it. Unlike most liberals, I continue to think that Obamacare might ultimately be overturned -- though I think the strategy on the right at this point is to let the courts do it, rather than elected officials. The party as a whole probably doesn't want to run on the "accomplishment" of having thrown millions of people off the employment rolls -- but maybe members of the House, with their gerrymandered, blood-red districts, wouldn't mind running reelection campaigns after being parties to the suit that made Obamacare fall.

So that's where we are now on this front. I imagine the crazies will amend Boehner's legislative draft and add a few crazier provisions to it -- but he's started with a bid that lowballs the crazy. As I keep saying, he's got enough low cunning to have kept his job in this crazy environment, so I continue to think he knows what he's doing.

I admit I hadn't thought of this particular angle, mainly because on the scale of 1 to 10, the plan is completely bonkers with a side of crackpot.  If the goal was to have to courts destroy Obamacare, Chief Justice John Roberts had his opportunity to do so last summer when he had four SCOTUS votes calling the entire bill unconstitutional.  For whatever reason, he didn't do it.

Maybe Boehner's trying to force his hand again or something, but the plan seems to now be, as with abortion, to weaken the laws so badly through Congress and SCOTUS that it does collapse, and maybe then Roberts will come to bury it.

And then the GOP comes in with a 95% identical plan that doesn't have the GOP trying to destroy it, and lo and behold, Republicans fixed Obamacare.  I think that's the real, final plan.