Rule of the few

Political irrationality

Let us take a few paragraphs today to explain the utter irrationality of the House Republican scheme to derail Obamacare by threatening the shutdown of the government.

Then let’s take a few more paragraphs to describe the political cancer that actually rewards this madness, rendering the national political condition somewhere between dysfunctional and beyond hope.

Permit me to restate and repeat all of that for clarity and emphasis: Irrational right-wing Republican actions in the U.S. House of Representatives get sustained these days by the distorted existence of hyper-partisan and self-perpetuating constituencies that demand irrationality.

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To begin, there is this indisputable fact: Shutting down federal spending for the government on Oct. 1 would not stop Obamacare.

It would stop a paycheck for a freedom-defender in the military. But it wouldn’t stop diddly in the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans would have taken a hostage who is immune from risk.

You see, the continuing resolution that needs to be re-upped by Oct. 1 covers annually renewed discretionary federal spending. And that bears not at all on the Affordable Care Act, as I will explain: Medicaid expansion is mandated entitlement spending, and would continue.

Spending to set up and promote the state health-care exchanges to become operable Oct. 1 has already been distributed to the states.

The individual mandate to purchase health insurance is a matter of law not requiring spending.

The subsidies for lower-income persons buying mandated insurance on those exchanges will require new funding, yes, but not for a good while, until the first of the year. If Republicans intend to keep government shut down from October into January, then Obamacare would be the least of our crises.

The longest modern government shutdown was 21 days. You can shut down discretionary spending for a few days and not bother anyone enormously.

But months? That would bring complete chaos.

And if House Republicans choose instead to go to the mat in mid-October against raising the debt ceiling for supposed anti-Obamacare leverage, then the story would be the same, except even much worse.

If the government couldn’t raise the amount it could borrow to cover debt already compiled, then it would lack the cash for continued-level funding and it would default on some of its debt. That would cause damage to the national credit rating and invite global market collapse.

So then you would have worldwide economic calamity.

But you’d still have Obamacare, meaning Medicaid expansion, insurance exchanges and the individual mandate.

Maybe it’s true that your health insurance rates will go up under Obamacare. So Republicans would propose to help you by causing your retirement savings to collapse.

Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Tim.

You could end Obamacare only by straight-up votes of the House and Senate to repeal it, or individual parts of it,which you’ll not get in the Senate, and then by overriding President Barack Obama’s certain veto by extraordinary majority votes that could not be achieved.

All of that explains why even one of the zaniest Republicans, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, traipsed to a Republican gathering in Michigan over the weekend and said it’s unlikely we can actually undo Obamacare.

So now let me describe the aforementioned political cancer that produces a distorted constituency for this madness.

Every 10 years we redraw our U.S. House districts to reflect population shifts in the Census. Every time, congressional incumbents with friendly home-state partisan legislatures manage to get their districts redrawn in such a way as to consolidate their agreeable constituencies. Gerrymandering, it’s been called.

The effect is that, in the last election, Democrats got a million more votes nationwide for the House than Republicans, but Republicans kept their majority.

The Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voter Index shows that 186 House Republican seats represent districts that voted Republican by 5 percent or more above the national percentage in the last presidential race.

Thus these House Republicans aren’t reflecting the national interest, but an artificially compressed and consolidated and partisan one.

They worry about getting opposed from the even-kookier-right in a primary, which is the only conceivable way they might get beat.

Our political body designed to be closest to the people-the U.S. House of Representatives-is now actually closest, indeed answerable only to, enclaves.

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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.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 09/24/2013

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