For GOP and health-care reform, politics trumps leadership

By Nicholas Wilbur 

Republicans may sometimes demonstrate a butter-finger grasp on reality, but they're not so deranged that they sincerely believe that pigs will sprout wings and fly or that hell will freeze over anytime soon.

And yet, they're knowingly pissing into the wind by trying to overturn what is arguably the most historic piece of social legislation since civil rights. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill this week to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. It's doomed in the Senate, where Democrats maintain majority voting power, and even if Republicans managed to lure enough Democratic Senators to the dark side and join them in their repeal efforts, there is no doubt that President Obama would veto it.

Odds are everything in legislating, and they aren't looking good right now for Republicans. But what if legislation isn't the goal?

There is ample evidence to support the claim (made here, by me) that Republicans aren't in fact suffering from the romantic idealism of some deranged dream wherein they believe they will actually succeed in their efforts to repeal health care. They know it's doomed.

The media arm of the Republican Party admitted as much after the vote Wednesday. In a moment of uncharacteristic accuracy, Fox News ran a story describing the House vote as "largely symbolic":

The newly muscular House Republicans voted Wednesday to overturn President Obama's health care overhaul – a move that is largely symbolic because the Democratic-controlled Senate is poised to ignore it while Obama is certain to veto it should it somehow pass through Congress.

And two of the GOP's leading anti-hope pitchmen admitted it a day before the votes were cast.

In an interview with Fox's Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday, nationally syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer gave worried Tea Partiers a glint of hope in the possibility that Republicans could convince enough Democrats in the Senate to overturn the law. The goal is not to then rev up the lobbying machine and persuade the president against a veto. The goal is to make it a political issue for Obama in his 2012 re-election campaign:

[T]here are 23 Democrats [in the Senate] who have to be re-elected in 2012, and a lot of them are in red states. You could get a majority on that. Now, of course, it's not going to get enough to override a veto, but the whole purpose of this –- nobody expects that ObamaCare will be repealed in the next two years – but it will be one of the major issues in the presidential election, and that I think is what it ought to be.

Because of the presidential veto, the repeal bill won't become law even if it gets the nod from both chambers of Congress – Tea Partiers can thank the Constitution for that one – but Republicans are making sure that health care is a political issue for the president in his re-election bid.

Is it completely accurate to say that Republicans drafted this two-paragraph repeal bill to replace a 2,300-page reform law only because they wanted to make it a campaign issue for Obama in 2012?

Yes. They knew it couldn't pass.

Are we surprised?

No. This is the Republican messaging machine in action, two years early.

Despite the staunch anti-reform rhetoric, Republicans actually have no hopes of repealing health-care reform. They care only about the potentially negative political effects health-care reform would have for those forced to defend it during the next election. They are using the legislative process to erect election hurdles for the president and the Democratic Party. It may prove an effective engineering tactic in crafting 2012 talking points, but it will also remind Americans why they so loathe the vile and manipulative world of D.C. politics.

Democrats spent the last two years earning the title of the most productive majority party in Congressional history. Republicans spent the last two years obstructing the legislative process by filibustering more bills than any other minority party in history. We thought they did this because they legitimately opposed the legislation proposed by the majority party. With this repeal bill – the first significant piece of legislation drafted by the majority Republican Party – we know the truth: that Republicans have no use for policy; they care only about politics, whether they're in the minority or the majority. Considering that their politicking resulted in a near sweep of the 2010 midterm elections, there's no reason to expect any less. What would be the point in tackling actual issues when partisan demagoguery has proven effective enough in garnering public support?

We often use "lawmaker" and "politician" interchangeably, and while some have successfully toed the line between the two by exercising the tactics of the latter in order to pass laws that earn them the title of the former, Republicans are evidence that there is, in their case, a stark contrast between legislating and politicking.

At least now we know.

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)