Her congressional office issued two statements several hours apart, both lamenting that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – ObamaCare in GOP parlance – locks in some $105 billion in future spending to expand health care coverage, set up insurance exchanges, and pay for the nuts and bolts of the new health care law.
Such “advance appropriations,” Bachmann said, make it difficult [note that it was not claimed to be impossible]
for current and future Congresses to defund the bill, the GOP’s fallback position in light of the long odds against repeal.
It would require time and effort but should not be all that "difficult."
1. Pass separate appropriations for each of the many federal agencies involved.
2. Specify what the funds can, and of at least equal if not greater importance what they cannot, be spent for.
3. Reduce the amounts of the current appropriations in amounts equal to the funds previously appropriated for the current year.
The House could pass such appropriations and were the Senate not to pass them, or were the Senate to pass them and President Obama were to veto them, those agencies would get no funding at all -- not even to pay employees or to buy paperclips. Either would result in the shut down of the various agencies, which neither the Senate nor President Obama could abide. I suggested individual, agency specific appropriations
here back in November. Thus far, nothing seems to have come of the idea.