Forcing Sebelius out might just create even bigger headaches.
It's true, the healthcare.gov website has some serious issues. And it's true that it's critical they be fixed. And it might even be true that we'd all benefit from some accountability for the problems.
And because all of that is true, Blind Squirrel Republicans have been able to find one of the few nuts available to them, post-shutdown/debt ceiling debacle: attacking the website. But Republicans still need to translate that opportunity into the one metric by which they've been able to measure success in fighting the Obama administration, and that's taking a political scalp. The biggest and most obvious one out there is that of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.
But just as the healthcare.gov website is not the Affordable Care Act, so ending Sebelius' tenure at HHS is not the same thing as fixing the problems. And while it's tempting perhaps even for Democrats to agree that new blood at HHS can only help, there are two things you need to keep in mind about what Republicans are up to here. First, that they are in no way interested in actually fixing healthcare.gov. And second, that they are in no way interested in replacing Sebelius.
Yes, they are interested in collecting her scalp and seeing her resign.
But as the announcement of Rand Paul's "hold" on the nomination of Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve Board should remind you, the more likely strategy here is that Republicans will attempt to block the nomination of any replacement at HHS.
How do we know they'd do that? Two reasons. One, because they can, and so they have. And two, because blocking any new HHS Secretary's appointment keeps the agency leaderless at a critical moment, and prolongs the exploitable lifespan of the website issue. Never mind that it'd be a crisis of their own creation. That logic certainly hasn't stopped them before, which you'll recall if you're old enough to remember as far back as, say, last week. Besides, it's a tactic that's worked before. Just look at what they did with the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and what they're attempting to do right now with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
No, collecting Kathleen Sebelius' scalp won't make the website work right. But it will give Republicans a chance to try to cripple HHS—and who knows how many of its programs that might require Secretary-level reports, approvals and other determinations—causing even more disruptions which they can then attack as so-called "failures" of the Obama administration.