Article: Obamacare/Tea Party
Source: NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/us/politics/gop-eyes-hard-line-against-health-care-law.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130911
G.O.P. Eyes Hard Line Against Health Care Law
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The Tea Party Patriots held an “Exempt America From Obamacare” rally Tuesday outside the Capitol, calling for President Obama’s impeachment.
By JACKIE CALMES
Published: September 10, 2013
WASHINGTON — The House Republican leadership signaled Tuesday that Republicans would support an essential increase in the nation’s debt limit in mid-October only if President Obama and Democrats agree to delay putting his health insurance program into full effect — a demand that sets the stage for another economically risky confrontation.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Representative Eric Cantor headed to a Republican strategy session on Tuesday.
The strategy, which RepresentativeEric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, outlined to a private caucus of Republicans, underscored the clout of the most militant conservatives, whose demands to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act have cleaved the party. While the tactic is fraught with risk for Republicans, some conservative lawmakers and groups objected that it did not go far enough in using the looming fiscal deadlines as leverage with Democrats.
The proposal for dealing with both fiscal fights of the fall — on a continuing resolution to keep financing federal operations after the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, and a mid-October deadline for increasing the Treasury borrowing limit — seemed to reflect House leaders’ belief that Republicans’ bigger political risk is being blamed by voters for a government shutdown, as they were during the Clinton administration.
Many economists and analysts say the bigger economic risk, however, is a failure to lift the debt ceiling, which would leave the Treasury unable to pay creditors and bills that the government already is obligated for, harm the nation’s credit rating and ultimately could cause the first default. Yet that issue is where House leaders are making their more serious stand against the three-year-old health insurance law they call Obamacare. Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio had already promised “a whale of a fight” with the administration over the debt limit, and Mr. Cantor shared more specifics of the strategy with his colleagues at the party meeting.
“This law is not ready for prime time and will never be,” Mr. Cantor said in a statement.
This week, he said, the House will vote on a resolution to continue discretionary spending for domestic and military programs from Oct. 1 through Dec. 13 at the current reduced levels, which reflect the across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester, which Mr. Obama and Democrats want to end. To appease hard-line conservatives, the House will also vote on a companion resolution to defund the health care program.
The Republican House majority presumably would pass both resolutions. But the Democratic-controlled Senate could choose to ignore the health insurance measure and negotiate over government funding.
The Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have agreed to meet on Thursday, for the first time since Congress returned from its five-week summer recess, to begin discussions on the coming fiscal fights over the continuing resolutionand the debt limit.
In the House, the Republicans’ private caucus on Mr. Cantor’s strategy came as Congress was roiled by the debate over Syria. While several lawmakers lodged objections, the reception was not so hostile initially to dissuade the leadership from following through.
But the Club for Growth, an activist group feared by many Republicans for its track record of financing primary campaigns against incumbents deemed insufficiently conservative, quickly sent an e-mail to Congressional offices urging opposition to the proposed continuing resolution, and warning that the vote would be part of the group’s annual scorecard for lawmakers.
“Rather than fight to defund Obamacare, or to even have an honest debate about it, House leaders have decided to go with a ‘smoke and mirrors’ strategy that avoids the issue,” the club’s vice president for government affairs, Andy Roth, wrote in the e-mail.
And the club president, Chris Chocola, a Republican former congressman from Indiana, in a statement characterized the strategy as “legislative tricks,” and added, “I hope this proposal is nothing more than a bad joke and is quickly discarded.”
Outside the Capitol, Tea Party supporters protested the health insurance law and called for Mr. Obama’s impeachment. One sign pictured the president alongside Hitler and Stalin with the words “Abort Obumacare!” and “Impeach the Liar!”
While House leaders’ immediate problem is unifying Republicans behind a fiscal strategy, ultimately they need support from Senate Democrats and Mr. Obama to both finance military and domestic programs and raise the debt limit. And the White House and most Congressional Democrats support the health law and oppose Republicans’ proposed budget levels.
Those levels, Democrats argue, provide more money and flexibility for the Pentagon, while freezing domestic programs at sequestration levels lower than provided in the budgets that Mr. Obama proposed and the Senate passed for the 2014 fiscal year.
A White House official said that the administration had not seen House Republicans’ proposed language for a government-funding resolution, but that the president would not accept anything “that defunds Obamacare or further cut the investments we need to grow and create jobs.” As for the debt limit, the official reiterated the president’s position that he will not negotiate over raising the borrowing ceiling.
“Unfortunately, it sounds like the extreme right wing has once again defeated the wiser voices within the Republican Party,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee. Republicans, he added, “are now threatening our entire economy if we don’t hand control of Americans’ health care back to the insurance industry.”
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