John Fund:
Hershey, Pa. — It’s a bit surprising that Jay Leno showed up last week as the entertainment at the first joint Senate–House Republican congressional retreat in decades. While Leno, the 64-year-old former host of NBC’s Tonight Show, was scrupulously non-partisan in his jibes and jabs, he added a touch of Hollywood flash to the serious discussions on budgets and bills. His favorite jokes involved Obamacare: “I’m telling you this Obamacare is getting serious and painful. I went in for a prostate exam the other day, and it was conducted by a government drone.”
If any topic dominated the three-day congressional retreat (held in America’s “Chocolate City” of Hershey, Pa.), it was indeed Obamacare — specifically, how both houses of Congress should handle a consistently unpopular program that President Obama nonetheless intends to preserve as a crowning legacy of his administration. The first message the Senate and House leadership had for their rank-and-file troops was that they should be patient. Members leaving a closed-door briefing said that both Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker John Boehner made clear that the differing rules for each chamber meant that the Senate would lag behind the House in passing legislation to dismantle or change parts of Obamacare.
“It’s going to be better than it was, but the House still proposes and the Senate still disposes,” said Representative Daniel Webster, a former speaker of Florida’s state house who recently hoped to replace Boehner as speaker of the House. “You just sort of forget that they’re not going to be able to operate like we operate. But it’s going to be better, that’s the great promise, and I think people will be happy about that.”
Looming over everyone at the congressional retreat was the court case King v. Burwell, which will be argued before the Supreme Court in March and probably decided in June. The case amounts to an attack on the central nervous system of Obamacare: the federal-government exchanges that were set up to subsidize health insurance for low-income consumers. If the Supreme Court ultimately finds that the Obama administration violated the law in issuing subsidies to some 6 million Americans in the 37 states where the federal government (rather than the individual state) runs the health-care exchanges, it could force a wholesale revision of Obamacare. Jonathan Turley, a liberal constitutional-law expert at George Washington Law School, told me recently that a Supreme Court victory for the plaintiffs in King would put the continued existence of Obamacare up for grabs and force President Obama to the negotiating table with Congress and state legislatures.
The message that speaker after speaker rammed home to Republicans at the retreat was that they had better be prepared for a possible Supreme Court decision striking down subsidies in the 37 exchanges. “We should have a plan or framework visible by early March to improve the comfort level of the Supreme Court in striking down the exchanges,” Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina says. “Working speedily to show alternatives will also make it easier for the American people to understand who is standing in the way of a better health-care system.”
From the same article:
That’s about as close as any republican has yet come to acknowledging that Obamacare has actually been a positive change for millions of Americans, and that eliminating it would immediately have negative consequences for a like number. If Obamacare were to be stuck down, they’d soon discover that there are no quick and easy fixes. This could quickly become a serious threat to their own “comfort level,” particularly in the run up to a national election.
The Supreme Court only has to be comfortable with how their decisions relate to matters of constitutional principle. They’re pretty much immune to any worries about how elections will turn out.