Last month, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)
appeared to put his conservative credentials on the line to beat back the insanity of Ted Cruz's scheme to defund Obamacare by threatening to shut down the federal government:
It’s not an achievable strategy. It’s creating the false impression that you can do something when you can’t. And it’s dishonest. [...] The strategy that has been laid out is a good way for Republicans to lose the House.
Score one for Team Sanity, right? Well, you'd think so, except as Brian Beutler
notes, last week in the same town hall during which he
mused about impeachment, Coburn explained that the reason he opposed tying Obamacare repeal to a government shutdown is that he thinks tying it to the debt limit makes more political sense.
Asked by a constituent to explain what he would do instead of the Cruz plan, Coburn said:
You attach it to the debt limit. The point is that you attach a repeal of the mandatory spending to the debt limit. Otherwise the debt limit doesn’t go up. [...] The one thing that the average American agrees with us is that trimming down the size of the federal government is a good thing. That’s an 80 percent issue in this country. Restricting the debt limit does both that and repeals the Obamacare. Or at least delay it for a couple years.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this, because on the one hand, you've got Tom Coburn opposing the defund scheme because he says it is doomed to failure and that pushing forward with it (and the resulting shutdown) would be a political disaster. And then on the other hand, you've got him saying that it's plausible Obamacare could be repealed, or at least substantially delayed, if Republicans hold the debt limit hostage ... and that doing so would be a political home run, popular with 80 percent of the public.
The good news is that I don't think Coburn will get his wish: There aren't enough votes in the Senate to tie Obamacare repeal to the debt limit and when October rolls around, it would be pretty hard for the House to explain a debt limit hostage crisis over Obamacare when it passed a clean debt limit increase earlier this year and funded Obamacare just a few weeks earlier. Even if they did go nuts and hold the debt limit hostage, the pressure on President Obama to take extraordinary action to mitigate the economic damage from default would be enormous, and even though he'll never admit it, in that situation, he'd have options.
That being said, even having a battle over this would at best be a major distraction. The government should be focused on creating jobs, not on avoiding self-inflicted political disaster. Given that Coburn was once a practicing physician, I'd like to think he's smart enough to realize that his proposal is doomed and would be destructive, even though that would also mean he was lying. If not, then when it comes to being the craziest anti-Obamacare zealot in the Senate, it's time for Ted Cruz to move over, because his plan ain't got nothing on Coburn's.