Home / General / The GOP Will Not Have An Alternative to the ACA. Do They Need To?

The GOP Will Not Have An Alternative to the ACA. Do They Need To?

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With the Supreme Court quite likely to willfully misread the ACA and destroy the insurance markets in a majority of states, the GOP is again pretending that it will at some point have some alternative policy.  Ed Kilgore (correctly, in my view) thinks there’s virtually no chance of that happening, especially as the fight for the 2016 nomination heats up:

No one at this point in the GOP is addressing how they deal with the ecstatic reaction of their party’s conservative activist base if and when the news blares out on Fox that SCOTUS has landed a lethal spear in the hide of the Great White Whale. Just yesterday polling data came out showing Republican rank-and-file opposed the idea of Congress doing anything to “repair” Obamacare. Ya think maybe the already difficult process of agreeing on a “fix” might be complicated a bit more by the shrieks of “NO! NO! NO!” from every Republican who has been told again and again that the Affordable Care Act is the worst thing to happen to America in living memory? Is it possible a Republican presidential candidate or three would exploit the situation by starting a crusade to destroy any GOP member of Congress who even thinks about “fixing” Obamacare?

The fact that congressional Republicans are highly unlikely to even be able to pretend to have an alternative to the ACA may make the Roberts and/or Kennedy marginally less likely to embrace pure lawlessness in support of Republican policy goals. But should the Court reverse King, will the lack of an alternative hurt the GOP? I don’t really think so. Obama, not congressional Republicans, is likely to take the brunt of the political hit if the Court wrecks the markets. Voters who don’t follow policy details are going to tend to blame the president for bad things that happen, irrespective of who’s actually responsible.

For the same reason, I don’t agree with the arguments I’ve seen in some quarters that the Supreme Court upholding King while using Chevron deference would be barely better than the Court wrecking the exchanges immediately, because a future Republican president would remain free to wreck the markets. I don’t agree. I’m not at all sure that a Republican president would do that unilaterally — the GOP can largely escape political retribution for raising taxes taking insurance away from 10 million people if the Court does it, but not if a Republican president does it. President Walker might do it anyway — but if it’s going to happen, it’s still better that a Republican White House takes appropriate responsibility for it.

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