WASHINGTON — Should they win control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in November, Republicans say they would consider using a fast-track budget process to repeal parts of President Barack Obama’s 2010 health-care overhaul.
“In the House we are prepared to do that, and I’m sure if you speak to my colleagues in the Senate, they are as well,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Friday. “This is a big deal for the American people. Health care is one of the most personal decisions that families make, that’s what’s at stake here.”
The fast-track budget procedure, known as reconciliation, allows lawmakers to bypass a Senate filibuster by lowering the threshold for passage of certain legislation in that chamber from 60 votes to a simple majority.
Cantor’s comments came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the core of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, ruling that Congress has the authority to require Americans to carry health insurance or pay a penalty.
House Republican leaders immediately announced that the chamber, which has voted 30 times to eliminate, defund or scale back parts or all of thehealth-care law, will vote again July 11 on repeal. Days after taking control of the House in January 2011, all of the chamber’s Republicans and three Democrats voted to pass a measure ending the health-care law.
Efforts to repeal or chip away at the health-care law have died in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats have a 53-seat majority.
Republicans say the best chance for success in their repeal efforts lies in winning control of the Senate and electing Republican Mitt Romney as president in November.
Even then it would be a challenge to muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Republicans could try to bypass a filibuster by using the reconciliation process.
“There have never been 60 popularly elected Republican senators,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., in an interview. “So whatever we’re able to do legislatively in the Senate, reconciliation becomes really important.”
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said, “It’s always better if you can deal with something in a normal legislative fashion,” adding that it was premature to discuss options for repeal in 2013 without knowing the outcome of the election.
“Right now, until we know what the makeup of the Senate’s going to be this next yearand who’s president, all the talk is just that, just talk,” Corker said in an interview.
The House’s chief tax writer, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, RMich., on Friday didn’t rule out the possibility of using reconciliation to repeal the law if Republicans were to control both chambers of Congress and the White House next year.
The White House is urging congressional Democrats to engage Republicans in a fight over taxes, pressing them to go on the offensive after the Supreme Court’s health-care decision gave prominence to the issue.
White House senior adviser David Plouffe is sending a memorandum to the House and Senate Democratic caucuses saying Republicans are misrepresenting Obama’s record. In a memorandum obtained by The Associated Press, Plouffe said the White House welcomes a debate on taxes.
Obama has called for tax increases on households earning more than $250,000 a year but has also said existing tax cuts should be extended permanently for the middle class.
The court upheld the health-care law, declaring that penalizing people who can afford insurance but don’t buy it can be treated as a tax.
Democrats, who controlled the House and Senate in 2009and 2010 when Congress was considering the health-care law, turned to reconciliation to pass the law after they lost their 60-seat Senate majority in January 2010 with the election of Scott Brown, R-Mass.
In both chambers of Congress, Democrats provided all of the votes for the health-care measure. They lost control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters Thursday that the prospect of a Republican-controlled Senate using the fast-track process to push repeal was “all the more reason that the American people should understand” that Democrats “want to focus on jobs, not taking away benefits that millions of Americans have today for sure.”
Because reconciliation applies only to measures that affect spending or revenue, many policy provisions in the healthcare law probably would falloutside the scope of it, meaning the tool could be used to repeal part, not all, of the law.
Though Democrats control the Senate’s agenda, Republicans in the chamber have pledged to press ahead with repeal efforts. Romney, appearing Friday at a swanky New York ballroom a day after the Supreme Court’s decision, called on the country to vote Obama out of office.
“What happened yesterdaycalls for greater urgency, I believe, in the election,” Romney said, to a crowd of donors in a ballroom at the restaurant Cipriani, which is across from New York City’s Grand Central Station. “I think people recognize that if you want to replace Obamacare, you’ve got to replace President Obama. And the urgency of doing that is something which is galvanizing people across the county.”
The fundraising event, which cost $2,500 a person and 10 times that for a photo with the presumptive GOP nominee, came as the Romney campaign announced that it had raised $4.6 million since the Supreme Court decision was announced.The campaign seems to be hoping that the decision will help rake in even more dollars. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, who introduced Romney to the well-heeled crowd, went so far as to joke that Chief Justice John Roberts “did this intentionally, because he really revved up our base.”
Roberts, appointed by former President George W. Bush, joined four Democraticselected justices to uphold the core of Obama’s health-care overhaul.
Information for this article was contributed by Kathleen Hunter, Kim Chipman, Richard Rubin and Peter Cook of Bloomberg News;
by Jim Kuhnhenn of The Associated Press; and by Alana Semuels of the Los Angeles Times.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 06/30/2012