Apparently wanting to leave for their five-week break on a high (?) note, or at least with a vote they can "win," Republican House leadership went back to the Obamacare repeal well. For the 40th time. Today's vote was the "Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act," H.R. 2009,
combining Republican hatred of Obamacare with their paranoid fantasies about the IRS. It passed 232-185, and would prevent the IRS from enforcing any part of Obamacare. Or at least it would in an alternative universe, one with a Republican Senate and a president who would sign it.
It's as baldly a base-frothing-up vote as any Republicans have taken on repeal, the last vote taken before an August that is going to be, once again, focused on feeding the base what it wants. They have to keep the base at as high a level of fear and paranoia and frenzied furor as possible to justify more Obamacare votes, to justify the extreme measure they're toying with: shutting down the government over Obamacare. This is the debacle John Boehner has wrought.
Boehner and his allies want to head off an effort by conservatives to demand that the healthcare law be defunded in a stopgap spending measure that Congress must pass to avert a government shutdown at the end of September. [...]
The Speaker privately opposes the strategy, but he has yet to rule it out and wants to let his conference determine the way forward over the August recess. He said on Thursday that no decisions had been made on how to construct the stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution (CR).
Does this smell like a set-up to anyone else? The House goes on recess immediately after its 40th vote on Obamacare repeal, taking that vote to their rabid constituents to whip up them up in town meetings they have already planned to be a
hate-fest against "Washington," i.e., the IRS, President Obama, Harry Reid, and Obamacare. Then they return to Washington, where Boehner is going to let them decide how to proceed on shutting down the government. Which Boehner "privately" opposes.
And the insanity goes on.
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