Spitting into the wind

At this writing it seems quite possible that, on this very momentous morning, the federal government will shut down as Obamacare will begin.

If so, Republicans in Congress would have forced the former in a deranged misplay to prevent the latter.

I explained it all last week, but let us refresh our memories.

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Obamacare is a combination of nonbudgetary dictates, mandated entitlement spending for Medicaid expansion and startup spending already distributed to the states.

Regardless of congressional inaction on prospective discretionary spending for the new fiscal year, states will open health-insurance exchanges … well, that would be today, as the law happens to provide.

Forcing a partial shutdown of the discretionary government changes none of that.

Republicans were working hard to fashion a spin for their irrationality. They settled on alleging that it was President Barack Obama and the Democrats who actually shut down the government.

They imaginatively based that rhetorical perversion on the fact that Obama and the Democrats would not agree to untenable provisions that House Republicans knew were untenable when they put them into the continuing spending resolution.

Speaking of what’s untenable, a government shutdown works tactically only if it continues into next year.

Continuing this nonsense to calendar 2014 would take us past the time that the federal government is supposed to start paying subsidies to help with rates for the relative few who actually will buy health insurance on these new exchanges.

So shutting down the government accomplishes nothing on Obamacare unless you’re really shutting down the government permanently, more or less. Anarchy thus provides the only Republican leverage.

For some, that may be the point.

I know all of this can get confusing. Indeed, confusion is the only card in the Republican deck.

Maybe this metaphor would help: Republicans took a hostage. The hostage was immune from harm. The Republicans shot the hostage anyway. The bullet ricocheted off the immune hostage and back into the jugulars of the shooters. Actually, the shotgun spray ricocheted into all of us.

The only mentally competent way to stop a law is to repeal that law, for which the Republicans lack the votes because of the way people have voted in elections.

In a sane world, House Republicans would be within their rights to attach an Obamacare delay or repeal to a proposed continuing spending resolution. But then when their effort failed for a lack of votes in the Senate, they would relent rather than shut down government because of their being outnumbered, fair and square, on one issue.

Another thing: House Republicans inserted in their last shutdown resolution (as of this writing) a special little poison-pill provision they knew to be wholly unacceptable to Democrats.

You call that a bad-faith negotiation.

This poison pill presumes to tell women this little gem: Your boss, if providing group health insurance, may choose to deny your coverage for the costs of contraception.

It’s called a conscience clause, presumably for those in positions of economic power whose consciences tell them they must be overlords of women’s private parts.

Company health plans conceivably could deny contraception to women but permit erectile-dysfunction drugs. It would be entirely up to your boss and his conscience, which perhaps he hides in his dysfunctional place.

Three concluding points need to be made. The first is that Democrats decline to concede to any of this in part because of a reason transcending Obamacare or women’s health. It’s that the federal government simply cannot pay ransom to hostage-takers.

The second is that, at this writing, Republicans are unified in this madness. So the entire lot of them would be to blame instead of merely their zaniest right-wing Tea Party fringe.

John Boozman and Steve Womack belied their previously sensible rhetoric and seemed to be settling, in the end, on the dark side.

The third is that it may turn out that none of this matters. That’s because Republicans, in midmonth, may force the nation to default on debt-to take Obamacare as an immune hostage once again-and send the globe into economic free-fall.

You’d lose more in your 401(k) stock funds than you’d pay in Obamacare premiums.

Bill Clinton called that … what was it?

Oh, yes. Arithmetic.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.