GOP 2016 game plan?
The election is next Tuesday, but conservative House and Senate Republicans have already established an agenda for the upcoming Congress if their party manages to reclaim control of the Senate and you won't be surprised by the first item on their list:
Though no calendar has been set, members want an early vote on Obamacare. House members have cast more than three dozen votes to replace aspects of the 2010 health care law, but any repeal effort has hit a full stop in the Democratic Senate. Still conservatives are eager to force Obama’s hand by sending an early repeal bill if McConnell assumes the Senate majority leader seat.
By the time next Congress rolls around, it will be 2015—
five years after Obamacare became law—and yet even though Obamacare has survived a presidential election, a Supreme Court ruling, and fifty-plus repeal votes in the House, the first thing these guys want to do is to try once again to repeal it.
I mean, c'mon, guys. This is ridiculous. Obamacare is here to stay, it's been here to stay, and yet another repeal vote won't change that one bit. The best thing you can say about it is that it's a pointless exercise that will at least distract them from the other damaging policies that they plan to push, including legislation that would ...
... increase border security without any legislative sweeteners like increases in visas for high-tech workers or allowing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Conservative Republicans also want to create work requirements for welfare recipients and force Obama to veto the Keystone XL pipeline.
House Republicans have already voted multiple times for these policies, so there's literally nothing new on that list, yet in the words of South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney, these wingnuts believe it will usher in a new era for the Republican Party:
One of our frustrations is that we’ve never told folks what we stand for. We’ve told them that we’re not Obama, but we’ve never told them what conservatives stand for.
Well, it's true that Republicans have said they're not for Obama, but it's nonsense to say they've been silent on those policy issues, because they've repeatedly taken futile votes on exactly these issues. That's pretty much all they've done, save for the occasional timeout when they've let Democrats deliver the bulk of the votes required for things like ending the government shutdown or reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.
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If Republicans want to enter the 2016 election cycle still running on a platform of repealing Obamacare, deporting undocumented Americans, closing our borders to high-skilled workers, treating poor mothers like trash, and doubling down on a "drill, baby, drill" energy policy, it will be neither pleasant nor a surprise, but at least there will be one silver lining: Their return to power will be very, very short lived.