Chicken With Defunding

Looks like we’re back at the ol’ debt ceiling stalemate. Or government funding stalemate. Or something like that. Is this the third one? Fourth? Hundredth? I can’t remember. It seems to happen once or twice a year now.

Apparently funding for the government runs out at the end of this month (it’s the end of the fiscal year), so we need to get a thingy passed. (“Thingy” is the technical term.) However the only acceptable bribe for Republican votes this time is a provision to “de-fund” Obamacare. I’m not exactly sure what de-funding does, but Republicans believe it will postpone the destruction of America, and they have been assuring us that it’s what the American people want. The House of Representatives votes on this thingy first, then it goes to the Senate. Everyone expects the House to de-fud Obamacare (because everyone in the House is certifiably insane), but we’re not so sure what the Senate will do.

Oh wait. It’s taken me so long to get this post together that the House has already voted to de-fund Obamacare. That means they’ve passed on a bill that will fund the government and avoid a shutdown … IF Obamacare is defunded/delayed/whatever. House Republicans are basically playing chicken with the Senate and the president. (Ugh, I used a stupid analogy as if I were a cable news host.)

Now the Senate has two choices. It can pass the bill through to the president with the Obamacare provision, which will allow the government to keep operating, or it can strike the Obamacare provision like it probably knows it should and run the risk of shutting down the government and looking bad before their constituents. (Shutting down the government, by the way, does not result in an apocalypse, but it’s more than just closing some parks, too. Among other things, it would adversely affect military veterans, who are already getting shafted pretty hard by the VA. The last time the government actually shut down, by the way, was 1996.)

There is also the slight problem that the president is likely to veto any bill which defunds Obamacare. I mean, it’s got his name right there in the plan, so Obama isn’t going to want to get rid of it. And if he vetoes it, the bill goes back to Congress and then who knows if they can get a revised bill back to him before the end of the month.

So is this an empty gesture by House Republicans? Looks that way to me. My personal conspiracy theory is that everybody wants healthcare reform, but no Republican can ever go on record as approving of Obamacare, because that would make them a traitor to everything America stands for. So Republicans are making this grand gesture opposing it so all their constituents can applaud them and re-elect them for taking a stand against the tyrannical Obama dictatorship, despite the fact that they know full well that there is exactly zero chance that it will really be de-funded because of the aforementioned presidential veto. And that suits them just fine because they know that healthcare reform is inevitable, and they’ve probably already lined up all their investments to take advantage of whatever loopholes allow them to get rich off of Obamacare. (As opposed to getting rich off of pre-Obamacare.) The only real question is how many days will the government have to shut down for them to make this empty gesture? Probably none, or they wouldn’t be doing it.

By the way, after this stalemate, there’s another deadline for raising the debt ceiling in mid-October.