In case you were worried that Republicans were too busy embracing Putin as their new Reagan to get any work done in the nine days they work this month, fear not, patriot.
House Republicans unveiled a Get Out of Tea Party Jail Free plan Tuesday that allows them to crash our economy so that they can appease the Tea Party by looking like they are defunding ObamaCare when they really aren’t.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) unveiled a plan this morning to tie a debt-ceiling increase to a one-year delay of Obamacare, according to the National Review. The House Republican leadership’s plan is a pretty desperate attempt to appease their base while getting out of taking responsibility for their votes.
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It’s so bad that Republican Senator Mike Lee, who has been pushing Freedom Works anti-ObamaCare agenda like a paid troll, accused House Republicans are “face-saving” with their base by appearing to be defunding ObamaCare when they are actually passing a continuing resolution.
“It is not a plan to defund Obamacare. It’s a plan to facilitate the passage of a CR in a way that allows people to claim that they’re defunding Obamacare without actually doing so,” Lee told Jonathan Strong at the National Review.
In other words, House leadership is trying to appease the base and not get blamed for shutting down the government at the same time. The Republicans big plan is to force the Senate to vote on defunding Obamacare before allowing them to present a continuing resolution to fund the government to the President.
If you’ve been following the fail, the only reason Republicans have us dangling with a CR is because they refuse to sit down with the Senate for budget reconciliation talks. Also, they have embraced the economically damaging tactic of using the economy as a hostage for every harebrained scheme their corporate bosses dream up.
Their big offer? Republicans will not raise the debt ceiling unless ObamaCare is delayed by a year. Who supports this? Oh, “only 6% of Americans want to see the law either defunded or delayed, including only 7% of Republicans,” according to a recent poll by Morning Consult.
Conservatives were not fooled yesterday when they first got wind of the cave-and-fund plan, with a source close to House leaders spilling today’s plan to “cave and fund” ObamaCare to Breitbart in advance of the House’s revelation.
The source added that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is “shopping an idea of passing defund through the House with the CR, but with a mechanism that would allow it to be decoupled in the Senate, defeated, and then the base CR be passed without coming back to the House.”
So, threaten to crash the economy for nothing except appeasing their own base with a trick? Yes. This is “leading” from ahead Republican style. With this plan, Republicans lose, the public loses, and the economy loses.
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