Don't be hasty, House Republicans
are now saying. We've got this whole potential Supreme Court evisceration of Obamacare subsidies in hand, the three in charge of making the plan say, but it's still a secret while we wait for the court to rule.
The trio of House leaders plans to outline specific policy proposals sometime before the court’s ruling, but will hold off on releasing legislative language until afterwards, according to a spokesman for Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
“We’ll have a plan that will be public before the ruling, but given that we don’t know exactly what they’ll say, we’ll have to wait for the ruling to have text to align with the situation,” spokesperson Brendan Buck said Monday.
Uh, huh. And Donald Trump has a
secret plan to save us from ISIS. One suspects that once again House Republicans are crafting a message for just two people—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, on the off chance that they haven't already made up their minds about how they're going to vote on
King v. Burwell, the case that could take subsidies away from at least 8 million Obamacare customers.
Just a quick recap here: back in January, right after Republicans seized power of both chambers of Congress, we found out that there was a "working group" of three very serious House guys, led by the most seriousest of all, Paul Ryan, who were going to solve this problem. In February, we were assured that they were going to get right on that. The day before the court heard arguments in early March, the three "leaders" published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal providing the vaguest of outlines for their "plan," which was basically a handful of ideas and catchphrases they've been spouting for the five years in which they haven't actually created a plan.
By the time we got to April, they were tossing around some ideas about how they might make the fix procedurally, but still not really talking about what that fix is. By the middle of May there began to be some signs of panic among Republicans who are thinking about the fact that millions of their constituents are about to lose health insurance and there doesn't seem to be any plan to do anything about that.
Which gets us to here, the beginning of June and just a few weeks away from the Supreme Court's decision with no actual legislation under consideration, much less introduced. Is it any surprise that now they're telling us that, of course, they have a plan! But it's a super-duper secret plan because, well, secret! News flash. There is no plan. A plan isn't possible because there's no way all House Republicans will ever agree on anything that would fix Obamacare. They don't want to fix Obamacare. They want to kill it, including House leadership. All this maneuvering is at best wishful thinking that they can be responsible legislators. What it really is, though, is cynical politics, manipulating the Supreme Court into destroying Obamacare, after which they'll blame President Obama and Democrats for not making a better law.