Erick Erickson makes some interesting points that could help us discern how this government shutdown crisis will end. Mr. Erickson opposes two possible “wins” that the Republicans hope to be able to claim in return for funding the government. The first is the Vitter Amendment, which seeks to exploit a drafting error in the Affordable Care Act that would appear to ban certain federal employees from receiving their traditional health care subsidies if they get their insurance off of one of the new exchanges. Unfortunately, for Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), the drafting error is exaggerated, and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has already fixed the problem. The OPM simply ruled that members of Congress and their staffs can keep their traditional subsidy but will be ineligible for the new premium support that most people will receive from the exchanges. Yet, Vitter is hoping to sabotage ObamaCare by forcing members of Congress to vote for a subsidy for themselves that others can only get in a different form.
Mr. Erickson dismisses this gambit as “a shiny object” and assumes that Congress would find a way around it in short order. In other words, it wouldn’t really undermine ObamaCare and it wouldn’t really help average Americans, so it’s worthless.
The second possible ‘win’ is the repeal of the medical device tax, which is an important revenue source for ObamaCare. Eliminating the tax would do significant damage to the law if the lost revenue wasn’t raised elsewhere. In theory, there is substantial bipartisan support for repealing and replacing the medical device tax, including from Democratic Minnesotan Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken. But if the name of the game is to starve the PPACA of funding, that bipartisan support vanishes. At best, the House Republicans could force a difficult vote on some lawmakers who have expressed a willingness to repeal the tax and have accepted financial support as a result.
But Erickson wouldn”t see this tax repeal as a victory for two reasons. The first is that it irritates him that powerful lobbyists might have the ability to get changes in the law that suit them, while ordinary citizens are incapable of getting changes that directly affect their interests. The second reason is that he considers the potential tax repeal an improvement of the law that would cost him an important and powerful ally in his crusade to eliminate the whole law. In other words, he is actively opposed to anything that might remove a legitimate objection to the health care law.
The result of this Tea Party objection to largely symbolic ‘wins’ for the Republicans is, as Ed Kilgore points out, that it makes it less likely that John Boehner can pass another Continuing Resolution with only Republican votes.
While most of the debate is whether these are other Obamacare strings on a CR could conceivably be accepted by Senate Democrats, the more immediate question is whether they’ll be enough to command the support of House conservatives. One of the trail bosses of the great conservative cattle drive towards the chasm this year, Erick Erickson, says no…
We need to remember that Speaker Boehner cannot afford to lose more than 16 votes if he intends to pass a CR with only Republican votes, so the Tea Party suicide caucus does not have to be very large for him to fail.
And that failure may spell the end game of at least the government shutdown half of his crisis. The Senate will reject the latest House CR today and send it back. If Boehner fails to respond with a bill containing the Vitter Amendment and a repeal of the medical device tax, then he’ll be able to argue that the Tea Party faction wouldn’t even accept a symbolic victory, and then he could go ahead and violate the Hastert Rule and rely on Democrats to pass a clean CR. He could also rally support in his caucus against the hardliners who wouldn’t take ‘yes’ for an answer and shore up his flank.
Maybe Mr. Erickson can’t see this outcome coming, or maybe he would welcome it as one more opportunity to blast the “Establishment’s” leadership. But, either way, Erickson and the rest of the Tea Baggers are making it more likely both that the Republicans will get nothing (which was already almost assured) and that the Tea Party will get all the blame (which was not).
