Last Call For, Well, You Know

House Republicans have now passed a bill that adds a one year delay to the individual mandate on Obamacare, something that will of course make the Affordable Care Act  not work very well at all.  The Senate is in the process tonight of telling the House to go to hell as they stand firm.

The bigger problem is that the shutdown is now all but assured, and that several hundred thousand people are going to be out of work until further notice, putting a huge crimp the economy, not to mention all the government services that will now be denied to millions of Americans.

But it looks like any shutdown may be short lived as I predicted earlier today, as House Republicans are beginning to revolt.

New York representative Peter King is leading the charge, and his fellow New Yorker Michael Grimm is close behind him. The group told leadership on Saturday they have 25 members who are willing to bring down the rule. 

That number of defections would defeat the rule, which, like all such votes, is a party-line affair. “How many of them are going to follow up today with the pressure and everything else, I don’t know,” King told me in a phone interview. 

King wants to pass a clean continuing-resolution bill. “This is going nowhere,” he says about the standoff with Senate Democrats. “If Obamacare is as bad as we say it’s going to be, then we should pick up a lot of seats in the next election and we should win the presidency in 2016,” he says. “This idea of going through the side door to take something you lost through the front door — to me, it’s wrong.”

The vote did pass to begin debate on the rule change, but then the Tea Party amended it to add the one-year delay of the individual mandate.  The Senate is going to reject it, and the shutdown will begin at midnight unless something amazing happens.

Eventually though enough Republicans will jump ship to push a clean CR.  When that happens, the shutdown will end.