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LIke I said, it could be very clever, if they realize it.

First of all, you and I know conservatives were lock-step into “defunding Obamacare”. And yet Boehner managed to get the conservative caucus to vote for fully funding Obamacare.

That is a pretty big deal. We all seem happy, and I don’t know why, because if the democrats had accepted the deal, Obamacare would be fully funded today.

Second, the one-year-delay of the individual mandate is wildly popular. Most people don’t like the IM to begin with, and think it was very unfair to keep once Obama waived the employer mandate.

Without the employer mandate, a lot of employees don’t have health insurance. Obama has denied health insurance. But worse, those people, because of the IM, are required to BUY insurance, or else get a big tax increase.

The Republican move would have given those folks the OPTION of going without insurance. This is NOT “denying health care” to anybody. Every person could still buy health insurance — there was not defunding of Obamacare, so the exchanges were still funded and the subsidies were funded.

All that the republicans asked was that we not levy tax increases on people who lost their insurance because of Obama’s illegal waiver.

That is a message that we can easily win. “Republicans are for tax waiver, democrats oppose tax relief and shut down government”.

The third part I thought was silly, but from a messaging perspective is powerful — the democrats shut down government to make sure they personally got subsidies for THIER health insurance in the exchanges, even though others won’t, and those who won’t get taxed for not joining.

So when democrats claim republicans tried to defund Obamacare, republicans can point out that this is a lie, and if the media is at all fair they will have to point this out. When the democrats claim the IM change was unacceptable, the republicans can point out they were just providing tax relief, and it had nothing to do with people’s access to health insurance.

I am not sure Reid knew what he was doing. By sending him successive bills, he got into the habit of just summarily rejecting them without thought. The first two were defunding bills, but this last bill was not. Did he fall for a trap? We’ll see.

This is the e-mail I sent to my two democratic senators:

Honorable Senator Warner,

While I disagreed with your vote, I could at least understand why you chose to reject a Continuing Resolution that defunded Obamacare.

However, the last Continuing Resolution passed by the House fully funded Obamacare. But you still voted against it. Why?

There were two riders on the bill, but neither had anything to do with Obamacare funding. The one of course was to remove subsidies for politicians buying insurance in the exchanges. If you disagreed with that, it would have been easy enough for the house and senate to fix that before january when it would have taken effect. But in any case, you certainly didn’t decide to shut down government and take paychecks from hundreds of thousands of public employees just so you could get $15,000 in health insurance premium relief. You have millions of dollars.

The second rider was a tax relief measure, giving people without insurance a one-year reprieve from special taxes. Many of those people will be without insurance because Obama unilaterally gave their employers a reprieve from providing insurance. Obama essentially denied health insurance to hundreds of thousands of employees for one year.

The Republicans tried to help those people, by giving them tax relief for the same one-year period. But you voted against this tax relief for the uninsured.

This had nothing to do with health care. Under the republican CR, the exchanges were fully funded, money was there for subsidies. Every person who WANTED to buy insurance would have the opportunity. The ONLY thing the Republicans asked for was to NOT TAX people who had not purchased insurance. In one sense, they were asking to provide tax relief to the uninsured.

But you voted against this. You just shut down the entire federal government simply so that you could force the uninsured people to pay additional taxes next year.

SO I ask — why did you do this? Why shut down government for a small amount of additional tax revenue, taxes that are going to come largely from the poor and middle class people who are uninsured and therefore might need those tax dollars to pay for medical care?

Do you love tax increases so much that you were willing to shut down government over it? OR did you just fail to realize that the CR actually fully funded Obamacare?

Respectfully,