The House has passed ObamaCare repeals before, but this is the first one to pass both the House and the Senate and land on Obama's desk. Oh, and the defunding of Planned Parenthood is in there too.
It's the first time the Senate has used reconciliation to bypass the filibuster and pass the ObamaCare repeal with more than 50 votes but fewer than 60.
So sure, it's more than has been done before. Then again, you'd expect more when you've finally got control of both the House and the Senate. Is it going to actually result in ObamaCare being gone, or Planned Parenthood being defunded? Nope:
For the first time, Congress will send a bill that repeals Obamacare and defunds Planned Parenthood to President Barack Obama’s desk.
Republicans used the budget reconciliation process—a fast-track method to avoid a filibuster from Senate Democrats—to pass the Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act earlier this month. The GOP-controlled House will vote on the bill next week.
“You can use this bill once a year, and we used it for this,” House Speaker Paul Ryan recently said on Bill Bennett’s radio show.
“In doing so, we’re forcing the president to confront the failures of this law once and for all,” a statement from Ryan’s office said. Although the House has passed several repeal measures, this is the first to reach Obama’s desk.
If the GOP Congress had really decided to go to the wall against Obama on this, they would have attached the ObamaCare repeal and the Planned Parenthood defunding to the omnibus spending bill, which had to be signed in order to keep the government operating. Or they would have attached it to something else they believed Obama would not or could not veto. But they knew perfectly well that if they did that, Obama would not back down and we would get a shutdown battle - and we all know Mitch McConnell won't hear of that because the second kick of the mule, etc.
By separating the two, they made it easy for Obama to sign the omnibus, then go ahead and veto this - which everyone knows he will do. What that shows us is that they figured another year of ObamaCare and another year of paying for Planned Parenthood were preferable to picking this particular fight with Obama this year. But they weren't above passing the bill anyway and forcing him to veto it.
So what's the point of doing this? They seem to think there's some political value to making Obama veto the repeal - figuring that with all the things that are wrong with ObamaCare and the selling of baby parts for fun and profit, they can put Obama on the defensive and use that to press the issue in the coming election year.
But is that really the case? Obama's veto will not reveal any position we didn't already know he held, and he and the media have already got the song and dance down on both issues. ObamaCare is a big success because so many people are now covered. The Planned Parenthood videos were doctored. It's Bolshevik, of course, but since when does that matter?
The one thing I do find somewhat encouraging is the fact that they were willing to use reconciliation to pass the repeal. It makes sense, since Harry Reid used it to pass ObamaCare in the first place. But I didn't by any means consider it a slam dunk that McConnell would do it, so that's a welcome development. If we get a Republican president next year who is actually willing to sign the repeal, McConnell (assuming he is not then in the minority) will need to use reconciliation again to re-pass it.
You can't blame Congress for passing a good bill just because a bad president will refuse to sign it. But you can blame them (and I do) for not using leverage when they have it to make it as difficult as possible for the bad president to issue the bad veto. By doing it like this, they made it way too easy for him. If all they were trying to do was prove to the base that they can do conservative priorities, I think the base will be a little more convinced the first time they don't shrink from the fight that the conservative priorities require.
It's a first in two ways:
