Why Defunding Obamacare Is an Idea That Won't Die

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/why-defunding-obamacare-is-an-idea-that-wont-die/279581/



The Tea Partiers who are convinced Obamacare can still be stopped gathered in front of the Capitol on Tuesday. There were perhaps a couple thousand of them, from all over the country, some in buses chartered by local patriot groups. One man carried this sign:

HEY YOU
CREEPS
WE ARE BACK

This time, the “creeps” are the Republicans who are refusing to go along with the scheme to block Obamacare by taking away its funding. Signs and speakers, from activists like the the Tea Party Patriots’s Jenny Beth Martin to more than a dozen Republican members of Congress, excoriated House Speaker John Boehner as weak-willed and untrustworthy. “‘No!’ to BoehnerCare!” proclaimed one placard. (Another announced that Obama was “a bigger threat than al Qaeda.”) While Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky urged his party not to be the “invertebrate caucus,” a middle-aged white man stood next to me shouting, “Send Boehner home! Screw the SOBs! Send 'em home!”

Here’s why it matters. First, now that vote on intervening in Syria has been indefinitely tabled, Congress can get back to its previously scheduled disaster -- the continual confrontation over the budgeting process. (The federal government's funding will run out at the end of the month, and the debt ceiling will be hit sometime in October, forcing Congress to authorize more spending or provoke government shutdown and default, respectively.) The ardor on the right for defunding Obamacare has already thrown a wrench in the process, making shutdown or default harder to avoid. Second, it’s the latest chapter in the ongoing struggle for dominance between the Republican establishment and grassroots -- a struggle that will determine the beleaguered party’s fate, and by extension the political future of the country, in the years to come.

When the “defund Obamacare” movement began this summer, most Republicans believed it was safe to ignore it. It was not so much a legislative strategy, after all, as a magical-thinking fever dream. The idea: Since the expiration of federal funding at the end of this month coincides with the October 1 opening of the Obamacare exchanges, Congress, according to the defunders, should agree to keep funding the rest of the government, but strip the money needed to implement the health-care law. When others pointed out that the Democrat-controlled Senate was unlikely to pass, and Obama was unlikely to sign, a proposal gutting his hard-won signature domestic achievement, and that the result would be a government shutdown for which Republicans would be blamed, these people were informed that they were creeps and liars and wimps. It was, come to think of it, not too dissimilar from the pundits who continue to fault Obama for not being able to get anything done: Point out that the Congress doesn’t seem inclined to go along with his plans, and they reply, Well, with that attitude, of course not.


***or maybe it's because after passing obamacare -- the democrats left the field -- leaving only repukes to frame issues around obamacare?

[pampango]

1. "This time, the “creeps” are the Republicans who are refusing to go along" with the tea party scheme

to link defunding Obamacare with passing a budget or a continuing resolution.

"...it’s the latest chapter in the ongoing struggle for dominance between the Republican establishment and grassroots -- a struggle that will determine the beleaguered party’s fate, and by extension the political future of the country, in the years to come."



http://www.people-press.org/2013/09/11/tea-party-increasingly-unhappy-with-gop-leadership/

Looks like the tea party types are going hard at "biting the hand that created and nurtured them." Who wins? The TP types who think they are all grown up now and don't care who created or nurtured them or the "parents" who feel the need to remind the "kids" who the boss still is?