But Republican governors, especially from the tea party class of 2010, have been harming large numbers of people quite openly -- depriving unionized workers of collective bargaining rights, curtailing voting rights, dismantling democratically elected local governments in Michigan, curbing reproductive rights ... and, apart from Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, they all have a shot at reelection. Voters who aren't specifically targeted by these governors sure don't seem to be displaying much empathy for those who are.
The prevailing sentiment is that somehow, there's a bridge too far that the GOP will cross, and when that happens, voters will punish them resoundingly.
Empirical evidence so far doesn't show that we've reached that point.
A lot of the people harmed by a Supreme Court evisceration of Obamacare will be Democratic voters who wouldn't have voted GOP anyway. Others will be the same people who were subjects of the early Obamacare scare stories -- people who had pre-Obamacare insurance and didn't have their policies renewed. If they replaced those old policies with subsidized Obamacare policies and now can't afford those policies, who are they going to blame, over and over and over again in the right-wing media? They're going to blame Obama, accusing him of tyrannically taking away their old policies in the first place and thus being the guy who left them uninsured.
You can count on this happening, followed by "both sides are responsible" and then "It's President Obama's job to fix this" when it would be Congress's job to fix it, and they won't. Voters have completely forgotten the fact that the GOP shut down the government, remember? Of course it'll be Obama's fault. It always is.
Maybe the Court's Republicans are going to game this out and conclude that a ruling against the law will be too much for the GOP and conservative movement to handle. But I wouldn't bet the rent money on that.
But a lot of Americans are betting the rent money on that, about six million of them, in fact. There will not be "tremendous pressure for Congress to fix it" any more than there was Congress to fix anything in the last six years. The result is the GOP now controls the House for the foreseeable future and has a clear shot at getting the Senate in November.
At some point voters may punish the GOP. Will that number exceed the voters who want to punish Obama in November?
We'll see shortly. If you haven't noticed, the voters haven't exactly been punishing the GOP so far.
I have to agree, there is no hope to be had from the voters in the short run - no great mass of disaffected embryonic lefties will hit the breaking point and rise up to throw off their neoliberal overlords and make Jill Stein Queen by acclamation. The difference the voters will make is through electing dog catchers and precinct captains, followed eventually by mayors and state legislators then governors and congressmen and ultimately a president who can depend on the support of an entire movement of dedicated and organized and enlightened voters and office holders and power wielders. You know, what the Republicans and the Religious Right started doing back in the seventies while we were all praying for the Great Lefty Savior to appear. As they demonstrated we can expect to labor for thirty years before we start to see real results SO WE HAD BETTER FUCKING GET STARTED TODAY. Jesus fuck I hate the purity trolls who demand instant gratification or they'll throw the elections to the Republicans just to "teach us a lesson."
ReplyDeleteAny, I have to believe that the full court will overturn the ruling that - to this non lawyer - seems nit picking beyond belief and if that doesn't work then the Supremes will do us a solid. If that doesn't work, all we can do is shout out another "THANKS A LOT, ASSHOLE" to Ralph Nader and his nihilist buddies in the Green Party and get back into the trenches. Even the Democrats ought to be able to wring some small propaganda value from such a sociopathically wrong set of rulings, even this close to the November elections. The fate of the Senate hangs in the balance, as we must never forget.