“The American people don’t want the government shut down, and they don’t want Obamacare. The House has listened to the American people.”
That’s what Speaker John A. Boehner said at the GOP’s victory rally Friday after the House voted to pass a spending bill that cut all funding for the president’s health-care law-and took the country one step closer to a government shutdown on Oct. 1.
The American people, alas, weren’t in the room to speak for themselves. Yes, a majority doesn’t like Obamacare. They’re unsure about what it will do and worried that it might make their health care worse. But do they really want to defund the law, and risk the chaos of a government shutdown to do it? Probably not, most polls suggest.
As one Republican pollster told me, though a majority of voters don’t like Obamacare, they’re not angry enough about it to risk a fiscal crisis that could hurt the economy.
So why are Republican lawmakers hearing a different message? Because most of them represent districts so conservative that they are listening only to their own choir. “It’s clear where the public in my district is,” said Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a Tea Party firebrand. “They want Obamacare repealed. They want it defunded. They want it dismantled.”
Bridenstine, a Navy Reserve pilot from Tulsa, is probably right. In his solidly Republican district, Mitt Romney won two-thirds of the vote in the last presidential election.
A visit to the House side of Capitol Hill these days feels a bit like an excursion to an alternate universe, where the voters are all conservative, the will of the American people is crystal clear and the only mystery is how that Obama fellow ever got re-elected.
“This is all a result of redistricting,” a Republican strategist told me. “The only election these guys have to worry about is the Republican primary. The only danger they face is from the right.”
According to ratings compiled by Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, only 28 of the House’s 233 Republicans have even a theoretical chance of losing their seats to a Democrat next year; the other 205 are safe as long as they win their primaries. (The same is true of most House Democrats.)
Outside the conservative bubble of the House GOP conference, the politics of the budget standoff look different. Karl Rove, former political adviser to George W. Bush, has warned that the only winner in a government shutdown would be Obama. “This is one thing that can rescue him,” Rove said on Fox News.
In the Senate, Republicans acknowledge there is almost no chance of passing legislation to defund Obamacare, the president’s most cherished achievement.
The entire strategy, warned Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), is “a box canyon” for Republicans-a trap with no way out but retreat.
This may sound like just another round of Washington’s recurring impasse, but this time the prospects for a quick solution look worse. The Republicans have chosen to demand the one concession Obama is least likely to make: the crippling of Obamacare. And the GOP’s chief deal maker, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), is battling a primary challenge on his right, which means he’s not eager to play the role of middleman this year.
When Boehner described what the American people want from Congress, he left one thing out: They also want their government to solve problems, even if that sometimes requires an uncomfortable dose of compromise. They aren’t seeing much of that from the House of Representatives this year.
Editorial, Pages 12 on 09/24/2013