There is more yelling and screaming today about whether or not it makes sense to refuse to fund any more of the implementation costs for Obamacare. There is a group of Republicans who are signing pledges that they will not vote for any funding if it includes funds to implement Obamacare. Then there is another group that is loudly proclaiming that such a move would be suicidal for the GOP. Just this afternoon, Rush Limbaugh actually had a Utah senator as a guest on his show (which is extremely unusual) and spent much of the time discussing the effort to stop funding for Obamacare.
The truth is that there is a simple way that ought to resolve this problem, about which I have written in the past. Congress needs to break the continuing resolution into pieces. In other words, there should be one continuing resolution passed to fund the departments of Defense, Veterans' Affairs and Homeland Security, another to fund the Departments of Interior, Commerce, and Energy, and then others for different groups of departments and agencies. If the House were to pass a continuing resolution to continue funding for all of the defense related agencies like DOD, the VA and DHS, would the Democrats and president Obama really refuse to pass them because other resolutions did not include funds for Obamacare? That would mean that Obama and the Obamacrats would be holding the military and the national defense hostage to Obamacare. The Republicans could then easily answer the claim that they were shutting down the government by saying that they had already passed bills that continued things without change for nearly the entire government.
This process would result in either the Democrats choosing to shut down the entire government or just shutting down the Department of Health and Human Services (where the Obamacare fnds come from) while allowing the rest of the government to function. A shutdown of just HHS would not have anything like the impact on the public that a shutdown of the entire government would have. It would also focus the attention just on Obamacare. Oh, surely the media would lambaste the Republicans for cutting off funds, but that was what they did with the sequester, and we all know how that worked.
The truth is that there is a simple way that ought to resolve this problem, about which I have written in the past. Congress needs to break the continuing resolution into pieces. In other words, there should be one continuing resolution passed to fund the departments of Defense, Veterans' Affairs and Homeland Security, another to fund the Departments of Interior, Commerce, and Energy, and then others for different groups of departments and agencies. If the House were to pass a continuing resolution to continue funding for all of the defense related agencies like DOD, the VA and DHS, would the Democrats and president Obama really refuse to pass them because other resolutions did not include funds for Obamacare? That would mean that Obama and the Obamacrats would be holding the military and the national defense hostage to Obamacare. The Republicans could then easily answer the claim that they were shutting down the government by saying that they had already passed bills that continued things without change for nearly the entire government.
This process would result in either the Democrats choosing to shut down the entire government or just shutting down the Department of Health and Human Services (where the Obamacare fnds come from) while allowing the rest of the government to function. A shutdown of just HHS would not have anything like the impact on the public that a shutdown of the entire government would have. It would also focus the attention just on Obamacare. Oh, surely the media would lambaste the Republicans for cutting off funds, but that was what they did with the sequester, and we all know how that worked.
No comments:
Post a Comment