GOP's 'Ill-Conceived' Defunding Strategy Won't Work

by JASmius

So opines American Crossroads Founder and Bush43 Svengali Karl "The Architect" Rove.  And he makes a powerful case for why Tea Partiers are thinking with their hearts while their heads are out to lunch:

"The desire to strike at Obamacare is praiseworthy," he writes in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

"But any strategy to repeal, delay, or replace the law must have a credible chance of succeeding or affecting broad public opinion positively."
Rove, who helped organize the political action committee, American Crossroads, noted the "epic gains" Republicans made in 2010, when they had control of more legislative chambers than at any time since 1928 — and won more than half of the gubernatorial races in both 2009 and 2010. He said those successes were the result of independents voting Republican.

And independents remain key, he said....
But there is one issue on which independents part ways with the GOP.

Some 58% oppose defunding the Affordable Care Act if that risks even a temporary government shutdown compared to just 30% who don't oppose defunding the unpopular law, according to the poll....

[I]ndependents aren't buying the defunding arguments, he said.

"Independents went with Mr. Obama's counterpunch 57% to 35%," he said, while voters in Senate battleground states sided with him 59 to 33.

In GOP-leaning congressional districts and swing congressional districts, the president won 56-39 and 58-33 respectively, he added.

You'll note that Rove is reporting independents' views on TPers' defunding/shutdown strategy, not agreeing with them.  Like it or not, this is the political landscape on which this OCare defunding fight is being waged, and the terrain favors Red Barry and the Democrats.  A winning strategy has to take that reality into account; but TPers don't want to hear reality; they want what they want and believe that the rightness of their cause will alone turn the tide.  IOW, they're delusional, and, far from driving The One before them, by pushing for a kamikaze government shutdown run they're setting up the GOP to lose the one bulwark they have - control of the House - against a renewal of the Obamunist blitzkrieg that gave us ObamaCare in the first place.  That is all Mr. Rove is arguing.

And, for all the talk about "defunding" OCare, the fact is that, as Ed Morrissey writes, most of its funding is statutory, not discretionary, and thus not part of the budgetary process:

[Defunding] would create at least a de facto delay for a year for some of the ACA functions, but not all of them. Most of the funding for Obamacare comes from statutory spending and not budgetary spending, which takes the context out of the budget fight altogether. A recent Congressional Research Service analysis requested from Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) showed that the IRS would still collect taxes, state and federal ACA exchanges would still operate, and most importantly, HHS would still fund subsidies for health insurance through them.

If the goal is to stop the subsidies, then the defunding strategy would not succeed, not unless its backers could get 60 votes in the Senate for a complete repeal of the entire ACA, along with Obama’s signature on it. That opportunity slipped away at the last election.

What about the delay strategy? Grassroots conservatives dislike this option as a kick-the-can-down-the-road strategy, but it has its advantages. First, a delay of the individual mandate and the ACA exchanges would actually achieve the goal of shutting down the subsidies, something that defunding won’t accomplish. Second, the Obama administration has provided ample precedent for delaying key parts of the ACA, both on its own and through Congress, complete with presidential signatures blessing them.  Again on Senator Coburn’s request, the CRS detailed 19 instances in which the White House either approved Congressional delays on the ACA or instituted them administratively – most notoriously on the employer mandates and the insurer out-of-pocket caps, both of which cut against consumers while imposing a mandate to force them into the system anyway.  …

While Obama would refuse to sign off on a repeal, the dichotomy of leaving consumers to twist in the wind while employers and insurers get valuable breaks might be enough for the White House to back down temporarily from this fight.  After his Syria retreat, Obama has burned so much capital with fellow Democrats who publicly called for war just to see Obama back away that he may not have much choice but to let them off the hook with constituents angry over Obamacare.

The Politico agrees:

Most of the rules and infrastructure required for the law are already in place — and a lot of the money has been spent. The administration has doled out its major regulations, distributed funding to states for setting up the exchanges, readied the data hub that will transmit subsidy and eligibility information and awarded grants to navigators, who could continue helping people enroll.

Major parts of the law — its Medicaid expansion and Medicare changes — wouldn’t be blocked under a shutdown, as they are mandatory spending. The subsidies to buy insurance in the health law are also mandatory spending — although not all of those are supposed to be paid out right away anyway. A shutdown affects only discretionary spending, the annual appropriations.

The law’s insurance market reforms requiring insurers to ignore pre-existing conditions and provide a robust set of health benefits wouldn’t be affected either. “Anything dealing with regulatory changes in the law will continue,” said the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Bill Hoagland, a veteran of the 1995 government shutdowns and a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.

What will be more of a gray area are the furloughs for government workers that would be part of a shutdown or partial shutdown. The administration has some discretion here — and could keep workers on the job if they are implementing the law. Their pay may be from discretionary funds — but they are delivering a mandatory benefit.

So let's see if I can sum it all up: ObamaCare cannot be defunded; Republicans don't have the power to defund the miniscule portion that is within the budgetary process; and attempting to play "chicken" with the White House via a government shutdown showdown will inevitably destroy the GOP in the media, force their surrender, and cast their House majority to the four winds at the hands of independents AND fratricidal conservatives.  Have I missed anything?  Besides the three-front Republican civil war that erupted last night, that is.

The fact is that last November 6th was the last chance to stop ObamaCare.  And the American people "officially" opted to keep its namesake in power.  Whether that was the result of election theft or a century of dumbing down and corruption of the electorate doesn't matter all that much, because the effect is the same.  And it's caused Tea Partiers to become what the Democrats have always called them: the death knell of the GOP - and the late, great American Republic along with it.

Sure puts a whole new spin on the term "death panels," doesn't it?