The outrage is real and deserved.
On the other hand, there is absolutely no way that, in the end, tax dollars will not be funding Obamacare next year.
The conservatives, and the republican party, have not done a good job at all of messaging. We can certainly cause a shutdown, but even people who hate Obamacare will not be supporting the shutdown, and the political pressure will cause whatever threadbare coalition we got to start a shutdown to crumble.
And that would be the best outcome. The most likely outcome is 30 republicans who we could all name jump ship and vote on whatever the democrats in the house are willing to offer. It will be bad, it will be liberal, and they will do so.
The worst outcome is that 20 of those republicans get so spooked that they switch parties. This gives Pelosi the speakership NOW. Then there’s nothing stopping Obama, even before the 2014 elections.
The defunding of Obamacare should have been easy, and could have been done without shutting down government (or at the least, making it obvious that it was the democrats shutting down government simply because they didn’t get Obamacare funding).
But not now. We lost that fight a year ago.
If there was a way to win now, it would be through a tweak of Cantor’s plan, where instead of a single vote on Obamacare in the senate, we tied various parts of Obamacare to other abhorent spending the left loves. For each Obamacare item, it would be tied to moving the Obamacare funding to one of these leftist things we can never defund anyway.
Make about 10 of these. Force the senate to cast 10 votes that say “we want to fund obamacare, and we’ll cut funding for this other pet program to do it”. At least SOME of those Obamacare things would be so unpopular that we might even win some.
It would also be great if we had, over the past year, found a funding mechanism to support the 2 things about Obamacare that people like, because we were in no position to actually win CONCESSIONS on popular items just because the rest of the bill sucks. We were never going to put back pre-existing conditions, even though that part is the stupid part that causes all the trouble. We should have instead been honest, committed the tax dollars, and set up exchanges for people who cannot buy insurance because of existing conditions, that would only cover those existing conditions.
Make the left acknowledge that we all have to pay for their party — instead Obamacare passes that to people through increased health care costs, which the left blames on evil insurance companies.
But none of this will happen, because we won’t get passed the “lets just shut down government, and the 51% of the people stupid enough to vote for Obama will love us for taking away all the stuff Obama promised them that made them stupid in the first place”.
Sometimes I think conservatives have WAY TOO optimistic an opinion of the average person in this country. You’d think that Obama’s re-election would have finally knocked some sense into us. We have the house because we did a great job of redistricting. And we have a much better message, but only if we win votes, get legislation passed, and the average person sees that their lives are better.
The left’s goal is simple — keep people down, blame republicans for everything bad that is happening, and NEVER let any republican ideas pass that might prove we know what we are talking about. Without the Senate, we can’t overcome that. Without the presidency, we can’t stop them.
And we will NOT win the senate or the presidency if we end up blamed for the next recession through the shutdown or debt ceiling fight. And right now, we will be blamed, by a massive majority. It is all messaging, and we lost that battle a year ago.
No we lost that fight when Bonehead Boehner, refused to let Michele Bachman make any attempt to defund it. That is all you need to know about our GOPe.