Turns out that Sen. John Thune's (R-SD)
really dumb tweet ("Six million people risk losing their health care subsidies, yet @POTUS continues to deny that Obamacare is bad for the American people") was just Thune completely bungling what Greg Sargent identifies as the
emerging Republican narrative for a post-
King v. Burwell decision that puts them on the spot by gutting subsidies.
Sargent quotes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell being interviewed on Fox News. Here's the key part: "Depending on what the Supreme Court decides, we’ll have a proposal that protects the American people from a very bad law. […] What we will do is offer a proposal to protect the American people."
So the argument goes something like, "see, we said all along this was a bad law and now the court has proven it so we have to protect the American public of the really bad outcome of us fighting this really bad law." Convoluted? Hell yes. Sargent:
How can Republicans simultaneously argue that the American people must be “protected” from the damage that undoing Obamacare will do—from the damage that will ensue from a Court decision unraveling subsidies that are crucial to the law’s basic functioning—without implicitly conceding that the right response is to reverse the immediate impact of the decision, and cleanly restore the subsidies?
In this interview, McConnell is telegraphing a partial answer to that question. Republicans will argue that the post-King chaos is the fault of the law itself, and not the fault of the Court decision (which Republicans urged on) that is knocking out a key pillar of it. In this telling, the cause of all the damage will be that Obamacare held out the false promise of economic security for millions, in the form of expanded coverage, but that security was then snatched out from under all those people (thanks to Obummer’s incompetence) when the Court clarified what the law actually says. All this is only the latest way in which Obamacare is hurting countless Americans.
And that's how they blame Obama. That only gets them part of the way there, though. In order to be able to continue to blame Obama, they actually have to try to fix this problem they've caused. Right now it seems like the mostly likely way they try that is with a variation of
Sen. Ron Johnson's (R-WI) bill that would extend subsidies into 2017—and then
end them for everyone, including people in the states that set up their own exchanges. That bill also has a built-in "blame Obama" trigger, because it includes repealing the individual mandate which would result in a veto. But before you get to the veto stage, you actually have to get it past Congress, and that's not too likely to happen. That's because there's a large contingent of House tea party Republicans who look at that as "saving" Obamacare and they want nothing to do with anything that could be construed as supporting the law. For them, it's repeal or nothing, a stance they can afford to take in their cozily gerrymandered districts where they don't have to worry about re-election.
Of course, they can still brazen this through, do absolutely nothing, and blame Obama for the law falling apart. That, however, is going to be pretty risky for the 20-some Republican senators who are up for re-election in 2016 from states that are using the federal exchange, but particularly in the swing states—Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina. Right now, this seems like the likeliest—and most risky—course, not by choice but by default. Not unless they can convince the real-hardliners in the House that they have to at least give the appearance of trying to fix this. And who has ever been able to convince those guys to do anything that makes strategic sense?