Planning the Next Obamacare Offensive | National Review Online
By John Fund 1-18-15
Republicans recently mapped out possible moves in light of a Supreme Court case on deck this summer.
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 Halbig v. Burwell, which will be argued before the Supreme Court in March and probably decided in June.
-go to link-
No comments:
Post a Comment