Byron York:
There were 60 Democrats in the Senate on Christmas Eve 2009, when they voted in lockstep to pass the Affordable Care Act. Soon there will be 46 Democrats in the Senate, or perhaps 47, if Sen. Mary Landrieu manages to eke out a win in Louisiana. In plain numbers, the post-Obamacare trajectory has not been good for Senate Democrats.
The 46 or 47 Democrats in the next Senate are a bit different from the group that passed Obamacare. Sixteen of them took office after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. They never had to vote for it and have never had to defend voting for it.
Are those post-Obamacare Democrats as strongly opposed to changing the law as their colleagues who voted for it? Or are they possibly a little less personally invested in staving off challenges? It’s a question that will be tested in coming months.
“After [the midterms], the conditions for repeal and replace may be even better than most people think,” writes a Senate Republican aide in an email exchange. “Not only is there a fresh crop of Republicans eager to make good on campaign pledges, but a significant number of Democrats have no particular attachment to the law and may even want to be rid of it as a political issue.”
There could be some wishful thinking in that. Yes, the post-Obamacare Democrats include Sens. Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and perhaps another centrist or two. But there are a lot of solidly doctrinaire liberals in the post-Obamacare class: Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, Brian Schatz, and others. They’ll likely be just as lockstep as their predecessors.
To make fundamental changes in Obamacare, Senate Republicans will have to muster 60 votes, which means — if the GOP has 54 — they will need to find six Democrats to go along. On a few questions, that will probably be easy; for example, there is broad support for repealing Obamacare’s medical device tax. There could be such support for restoring a 40-hour work week.
Of course, even if six or more Democrats join Republicans to pass Obamacare-related measures, the president can still veto them. But he would have to overturn the will of a supermajority in Congress. Maybe that will give him pause. Or maybe not.
Some Democrats, and some outside observers, have tried to convince themselves that Obamacare did not play a central role in the 2014 campaign. The Washington Post reported this week that the GOP “played down its zeal to repeal” Obamacare during the midterms.
I cannot wrap my head around “getting back a 40 hour work week”… as part of the repeal of the ACA.
Our country was practically built on a 40 hour work week!! This ALONE shows the DEVISTATING EFFECTS of Liberal Via Democrat Policies driven solely by Political and Ideological AGENDAS…Not by what is actually good for the Country OR truly, it’s citizens…
The ‘hook’ in part, for companies to attract good employees was their ‘benefits’… Scan the ‘want ads’ today and you can ‘see’ the effects…No health care is offered in a lot…OR part-time positions are the norm.
How exactly was the Government expecting to prop up financially this program when very few companies are offering Full Time positions OR are forced to cancel Policies because they do not CONFORM to Government regulations?
Not to mention companies leaving the Country/ States for more ‘business friendly’ pastures…
The unconstitutional delay of the employer mandate until after Obama leaves office was done for 2 reasons. First, to attempt to shield democrats through the 2016 elections from electoral anger over the negative economic impacts of this evil law. The last midterms showed how well that strategy is working. The only chance it has to work is if the damned RINOs continue their weak attacks on obamacare.
The second reason for the delay is to give the democrat deceit of “You can’t just take away insurance from the millions of poor who are on obamacare” time to grow like kudzu. This is why we need conservatives with the backbone to stand up to this bullshit crybaby excuse from the left. Gruber’s videos show he cannot be trusted, and that he feels perfectly justified in being however much of a lying, dishonest bastard he needs to be in order to impose the socialist takeover of the US medical system. Anyone who took the time to read the bill knew that the Cadillac Tax was a means of destroying the private health insurance industry to make way for the totalitarian usurpation of medicine by the government. Obama, Clinton, Gruber, Kerry – every one of them is a dirty, stinking lying sack of crap.
Obamacare delenda est.
@Pete:
Gruber was also the designer of Romnycare. Now you might wonder why a CEO type governor, Republican to boot, would support such a program. Gruber tells how it was done: prices for health care insurance were low in Massachusetts, so the first order of the day was to (through a Democrat held state Congress) require all insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. (sound familiar?) Then, as insurance premiums skyrocketed, as they were sure to do, residents started complaining about the high cost of insurance. Enter the Dems to lay the blame on the insurance companies.
So Gruber, being the dishonest slug he is, recruited the help of Ted Kennedy (another slug) to secure a $400 million kick in from the federal government to fund Masscare. So now everyone is happy, right? No, Massachusetts has the highest health care insurance premiums in the nation, even with the rest of us taxpayers funding it. And that $400 million funding from the government paid for by the rest of us? It was just a down payment on Masscare. The funds continue to roll into Massachusetts from the rest of us taxpayers in perpetuity.