Republican lawmakers have all piled on to the
King challenge to Obamacare, gleeful at the prospect of the Supreme Court dealing a
"body blow" to the law by taking subsidies away from millions of their constituents. Nationally, their Republican constituents are okay with that,
according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation. But Republican voters in the states that are in jeopardy of losing their subsidies? Not so much.
Nationally, the survey finds, 64 percent of voters say Congress should act to fix the law to make sure no one loses their subsidy if the Supreme Court strikes them down. That includes 82 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents, and just 40 percent of Republicans. But if you ask just the people in the states that could lose subsidies because they're on the federal exchange? They want action, including having the states establish their own exchanges.
That's 51 percent of Republicans who don't want to see subsidies end in their states, those states that didn't open their own exchanges and are using the federal one. Those nearly three dozen states that are mostly red states. States that will have
Republican Senate incumbents defending their seats in 2016. The problem is, the federal funding for states wanting to set up their own exchanges has expired. So any state that wants to try to set one up has to do it on their own dime. That's going to be a big lift. The obvious solution, if the court does strike down the subsidies in these states, is for Congress to make a fix to the law. Something this Republican Congress isn't likely to do.
Unless, of course, the court does deal a body blow to the law and all those Republican voters who lose their subsidies demand action. This isn't as clear-cut for Republican office holders as they apparently think right now. Maybe all those Republican members of Congress leaping on to "take their subsidies away!" bandwagon will want to rethink that position.