GOP Senator Roy Blunt seems a bit perplexed by this whole showdown over Obamacare that has to date shut down much of our government’s key functions and may yet involve the debt limit, thereby risking global economic security. He’s got a problem because he needs the GOP’s wild and stupid wing if he is going to remain a senator; there’s no way a coalition of GOP moderates and centrist Democrats would get him re-eleted – like a nineteenth century  ingénue, coyly lifting her skirts to reveal a bit of ankle, he’s let a little too much corruption show. While that may titillate the big money boys, it does nothing for voters who pride themselves on their sober good sense. Which leaves Blunt, who is actually a smart man, doing a balancing act with the stupid as he attempts to navigate the potential pitfalls of indulging the latest GOP dumb-as-mud rampage.

As the clip below (h/t The Turner Report) shows, Blunt is trying to solve his problem by looking sage while offering a logically incoherent and historically inaccurate apologia for the GOP shutdown tactic:

Blunt’s rationale for the shutdown seems to hinge on three related assertions:

1. Republicans are just acting out because they didn’t get much say abut how the law was passed.

2. They are hurt that they didn’t get to amend or modify the law after it was enacted (he dubs it “unamendable”).

3. The President gets to unilaterally modify the law; Blunt’s evidence is that the administration has delayed the employer mandate. Ergo the GOP wants to delay the individual mandate in the name of fairness or something incoherent to do with which group would pay the most in penalties.

To answer Blunt’s first objection, you have only to remember when congress was involved in the endless process of healthcare “sausage making.” It was endless because of all the efforts to bring along Republicans; hopeless efforts because, far from being excluded from the legislative process, the hormonally challenged mental adolescents of the GOP were refusing to play; they were already involved in a separate game of kill-the-bill.

You don’t believe me? Remember the Gang of Six? After numerous delays to give the group, specifically the GOP members, time to come to agreement, the Chair of the group, Max Baucus, had to give up because the GOP members were “being told by the Republican Party not to participate.”

Blunt’s second claim ignores the fact that the GOP has consistently refused to work with Democrats to make the law better, opting instead for non-stop, futile efforts repeal the law or defund it. As a Los Angeles Times editorial  observed today, there are “several things that members of Congress could be doing now to make it [i.e. Obamacare] work better, if Republicans were interested,” adding that:

In fact, when Republicans complain that Democrats won’t negotiate about Obamacare, what they’re really saying is that Democrats won’t agree to kill it, delay the insurance reforms and subsidies until after yet another election, or undermine the law in a way that could send premiums for individual coverage through the roof.

The GOP’s clear objective is to dismantle the act, not to improve it – and the single-minded focus on that goal is what has led to the partial government shutdown that began Tuesday. Democrats can hardly be blamed for refusing to bargain over how to sabotage the law before it fully takes effect.

The quote above also puts a spike in the heart of Blunt’s whine about the fact that the GOP “offer”  to release their hostage in return for delaying the individual mandate was summarily rejected. It’s not, as Blunt seems to think, a question of fairness or a matter of revenue. It’s a question of the law’s success.

The employer mandate can be delayed, giving the government time to address problems, since it affects relatively few businesses and the delay will have little impact on the law’s implementation – a one year delay won’t, as Blunt claims, lead to many large business abandoning their employee health plans.However, delaying the individual mandate would “undermine the law in a way that could send premiums for individual coverage through the roof.” Obamacare cuts costs and can offer lower premiums because the individual mandate guarantees the big risk pool that is the holy grail of private insurance.

What Blunt’s actually arguing is that after the GOP refused to play the game, their Monday morning quarterbacking should entitle them to a do over – and if they don’t get it, they’re justified in shooting the umpire. Or, to quote Post Partisan‘s James Downie, ‘Republicans are acting like the little kid in a toy store who won’t take “no” for an answer.” Sadly for the GOP, that’s not the way things work – at least as long as the adults – the Democrats in this case – continue to act responsibly. And finally, no, Roy Blunt, these are not smart arguments for a smart man to make – no matter how he tries to obscure the embarrassing meaning of the things he’s saying with mumbly gobbledygook.  

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) after voting to persist in the GOP government shutdown experiment yesterday:

Our message has been pretty consistent: We want to keep this government open. We want to find a solution for the people we represent and for America. It’s hard to do that when the Senate won’t come to work.

In the same vein Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-3) is upset that the Democrats won’t give in and let the GOP do an end-run around all that democratic, majority rules sort of nonsense when it comes to Obamacare, or, as he puts it, “put aside partisan politics and do the right thing for hard-working families and pass this legislation [i.e., the House’s delay-Obamacare-for-as-long-as-possible budgetary CR] as soon as possible.”

Michael Tomasky paraphrases Richard Pryor on why these representative members of the GOP House can now legitimately be considered to be part of a  terrorist organization:

Back in the late 1970s, Richard Pryor had a routine where he gave a rundown on the various factions he’d encountered inside prison. There were the black Muslims, he said. They were fairly rough customers. Then there were the Double Muslims. The Double Muslims, he said, “can’t wait to get to Allah, and they wanna take a bunch of muthafukkas with them.”

Can  you uess who the Double Muslims are in today’s GOP party? Another part of Tomasky’s GOP-as-terrorists argument aptly cuts through the GOP’s – in this case Luetkemeyer’s and Wagner’s – laughable efforts to escape responsibility for their irresponsible willingness to pull the pin on the grenade as long as they take lots of other, mostly innocent folks with them:

… The complete psychological profile of this GOP also must reference the totalitarian mind. Here I refer to the common totalitarian tactic of accusing the enemy of doing exactly what the totalitarian himself is doing. Every totalitarian dictator from Stalin on down has employed this tactic regularly. There’s no surer way to get away with criminality than to accuse your political opponents of exactly the criminality that you are committing, to get the people looking the other way.

And so of course John Boehner said over the weekend that the Senate, if it fails to accept the House’s terms, “will be deliberately bringing the nation to the brink of a government shutdown for the sake of raising taxes on seniors’ pacemakers and children’s hearing aids.” And of course whip Kevin McCarthy said, “We will not shut the government down.” And of course Sen. Rand Paul said: “We are the party that’s willing to compromise. They are the party that says, no way, we’re not touching Obamacare.”

You don’t even need to have read Orwell to know these are quasi-totalitarian statements that depend on obfuscation, rely on the gullibility of the listening public. The obfuscators all know very well that most Americans won’t stop to realize that their position is a scandal to begin with. They’re trying to undo a law that was duly passed and then upheld by the Supreme Court, as if that were normal in American politics, as if it should be considered an acceptable tactic on its face. And they know that … some Americans (I don’t think most, in this case) will stupidly and dismissively assign equal blame to both sides.

Oh well, at least we can console ourselves with the knowledge that the ever-refined Ann Wagner is “gratified” that the GOP leadership capitulated without a fight to the constantly expanding crazy wing of the party. I’m sure some of the lower-rung federal workers who’ll be hitting the food pantries because they won’t be getting a paycheck will be equally gratified that their suffering, along with that of others who will be sacrificed to this particular piece of GOP hubris, is bringing such peace of mind to GOP Rep. Wagner.

From Rep. Billy Long’s (R-7) statement justifying a vote for a budgetary continuing resolution that seeks to delay Obamacare for a year, a vote that guarantees a government shutdown:

“Our military men and women put their lives on the line to protect our country and freedoms.  We owe it to them and their families to ensure they continue to receive their paychecks in the event of a government shutdown.”

Somebody needs to break it to Billy that he’s had two opportunities within the last week to ensure that our military men and women get what’s due to them, and he bungled both for no reason other than to make a stink about a duly enacted law that he and a few of his friends don’t like.

Maybe Billy doesn’t understand that votes have consequences and that this particular vote might very well create difficulties for lots of Americans, including the military members that he’s so worried about. This supposition may be correct since he doesn’t seem to understand that elections, such as the two that brought Barack Obama to the White House and then retained him in the presidency, should have meaningful consequences.

Or alternatively, maybe Billy just doesn’t like democracy. That’s right, democracy. The will of the people. Which is what 65 million Americans spelled out clearly last fall when they voted for the man who gave us Obamacare. Further, many of us who exercised our democratic perogative last November are also part of the ca. 69% of Americans who think Billy and his GOP pals should give the anti-Obamacare tantrums a rest. How democratic is it to thwart the will of the people?

Reporting the latest on the efforts of congressional Republicans to delay Obamacare and enact Mitt Romney’s economic agenda or else they shutdown the whole shebang, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quotes Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2):

“The American people don’t want a shutdown. But you know what? The American people are ready for a fight,”said Wagner, noting polls showing diminishing support for the Affordable Care Act.

“The president is willing to negotiate with everybody form [sic] the Russians to the Syrians to the Iranians. But he won’t sit down with ‘we the people’,” Wagner asserted in an interview.

What is it with these people? Does Wagner think she has some kind of spiritual power that allows her to channel the wishes of the the “American people”; what makes her so sure that we’re ready for a “fight” about Obamacare or anything else on the GOP wish list. If so, her channel is out of kilter since I’m an American and she definitely doesn’t speak for me or for most of the people I know. Which leads me to believe that her too grandiose speech habits reflect simple hubris – or that she’s trying to kick sand in our eyes so we can’t see that nobody is backing her up.

Wagner tries to justify her presumption by citing polls that show a majority disapproves of the ACA. Of course, even though media types rarely bring the fact up, based on other, earlier polls with different questions, almost everyone knows that at least a fourth to a third of the people who disapprove of the ACA do so because it lacks a single-payer or public option. They’re the “socialists” who didn’t get their way, Tea Party claims to the contrary, though, unlike the Tea Partiers, few of them would derail the healthcare reform we did get out of spite – hence the other polls that show that only a small minority support the GOP hostage tactics. In fact, a recent Pew poll found only 23% of Americans in fact want Wagner’s fight:

Take a look at that chart and tell me how Wagner can feel free to make such extravagant claims about what Americans want?

And what the holy crap does Wagner mean when she says that the President won’t sit down with “we the people” to negotiate? It’s true that he says he won’t negotiate with the Tea Party terrorists in congress – and the rest of the Tea Party whipped GOP – who want to hold the economy hostage to an agenda that lost at the polls in 2012. However, last I heard, these losers don’t have exclusive rights to that phrase. So, no matter how infuriating Wagner’s inaccurate appropriation of the constitutional phrase is, if “we the people” is a shout-out to the Tea Party, we better hope she’s right.

Ann Wagner’s pushing the newest trumped up anti-Obamacare scare. From her Facebook page:

In 2008, President Obama said, “In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year. We’ll do it by the end of my first term as President.” A few days ago, we learned that the average family of four will face increased health spending of $7,450 under Obamacare. With premiums skyrocketing across this great nation on hardworking families, how is ObamaCare impacting you?

Wagner’s referencing this Forbes article by one Chris Conover. It’s caused quite a stir; it appeared yesterday, the Conservatorium jumped on it up to their knees, tweeting and Facebooking it all over the known universe – hence Wagner’s – and Billy Long’s and Blaine Luetkemeyer’s Facebook posts today. Doubtless it’ll make it’s way onto the Facebook pages or twitter feeds of the rest of our GOP congressional delegation soon – like lemmings, they prefer to make their mistakes in groups.

The article that has Wagner in such ecstasies is total twaddle, of course, and quickly became an object of public derision among many economic policy types because of its obviously incoherent statistics and confused analysis. Some of the clearest online discussions of the problems with Conover’s assertions are in Igor Volksy’s Think Progress piece, and an excellent discussion of Conover’s statistical crimes by Univ. of Missouri-St. Louis political science professer, Kenneth Thomas.

Read these articles if you want to know why Wagner et al. are full of it. There’s no point in repeating points that others have made more efficiently and clearly than I can. (However, I can’t resist pointing out that the $7,450 figure that GOPers are trumpeting represents Conover’s estimates of increases in costs over ten  years – he really only shows an increase of $745 per year for a “typical” family of four – and he’s wrong about that too. None of the Missouri GOPers who tout this article have made this distinction clear which in itself serves as a comment on their motivation, not to mention their honesty.)

After the criticisms began to appear, Conover updated his article several times, not to answer his detractors in a substantive fashion or correct his errors, but simply to declare that he was too right! In the process he referred to articles by Avik Roy, a conservative writer who, as Steve Benen remarked, seems to want to produce “content with a credible tone; he doesn’t fly off the rhetorical rails; and he genuinely understands the policy details.”

Nevertheless, as Benen lamented, Roy was recently guilty of the same type of blatantly dishonest and/or shoddy analysis on the topic of California’s successful Obamacare implementation.  While Roy’s assertions were, like Conover’s, quickly refuted (most notably by Jonahan Cohn, Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein), they will undoubtedly continue a zombie existence among those on the right where no idea, no matter how mistaken, is ever buried if it serves a partisan purpose.

The lesson that Benen took from Roy’s and other would-be conservative intellectuals’ consistent misfires – and which applies as well to Conover’s effort to bend statistics  into unnatural forms – is that there is what he calls a “wonk gap” between the left and the right:

… As Republicans become a post-policy party, even their wonks — their sharpest and most knowledgeable minds — are producing shoddy work that crumbles quickly under mild scrutiny.

[…]

I write often about the asymmetry in American politics, and the consequences of a radicalized party in a two-party system. But this wonk gap points to something related but different: it’s not just Republicans who’ve become more extreme and less interested in substance; it’s also conservatives who’ve allowed their intellectual infrastructure to atrophy and collapse.

Credible policy debates are rendered impossible, not because of the chasm between the two sides, but because only one side places a value on facts, evidence, and reason.

And this is why the winner-take-all and devil-take-the-hindmost political culture of the day is so frustrating to those of us who believe in the benefits of intellectual give-and-take. For such exchanges to take place, all the participants have to act in good faith. Kool-aid and fine wine don’t mix.

In an earlier post I copied Ann Wagner’s email response to me after I wrote her asking that she respect the needs of her constituents and stand up to the faction of her party that wants to defund Obamacare or else. I was pretty amazed by her double-talk when she tried to pretend that she had “voted to keep the government open” by sending a DOA Continuing Resolution that defunds the ACA to the Senate.

What didn’t amaze me, though were her distorted claims abut the ACA. They’re familiar to anyone who has paid attention to Republican anti-Obamacare jabber. To her credit, though, Wagner did try to give a local example of what she deems the disastrous consequences of Obamacare:

As each day passes, more and more families are feeling the pain of Obamacare right here in the St. Louis region. Many of you might have heard a few days ago that BJC Healthcare can no longer afford to provide health insurance to its part-time employees. This is just another example of the coming economic disaster Obamacare poses when a large, highly respected healthcare company such as BJC Healthcare cannot afford healthcare for its own workers.

What Wagner does not tell us – although the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story she links to hints at it – is that BJC has been having plenty of problems other than Obamacare, problems which earlier resulted in 160 layoffs and are pretty likely to be behind their efforts to cut costs on employee health care:

Like other health care systems across the state and country, we are not immune to what is going on in the health care environment,” she said. “We’ve made cost-cutting measures to offset the impact of sequestration and to prepare for the impact of not expanding Medicaid.”

Aside from sequestration and the Medicaid expansion issue, BJC’s reductions are necessitated by a drop in elective medical services among health care consumers. Because they now face higher out of pocket payments for care, some consumers are putting off care for the time being, she said.

Let’s see. If the Republican-dominated Missouri legislature had only expanded Medaid, BJC would have  been better off. If GOP politicians in Washington hadn’t forced the sequestration cuts down our throats, BJC wouldn’t be better off still. And finally, if our free-market insurance delivery system – the one that the GOP is fighting tooth-and-nail to defend – wasn’t unable to control costs without resorting to higher out-of-pocket costs for patients who then defer care, things would be all ducky for BJC. But let’s, Ann Wagner, blame it all on Obamacare; it makes a much simpler and, for Republicans, a much more conveneint story.

Nor am I the only person who thinks the GOP jobs and Obamacare narrative is a bit empty when it comes to actual content. Kaiser Health News reports that some employers are using Obamacare as an excuse for cost-cutting measures that were underway long before the law. Others may actually be considering cutting part-timers hours back in order to weasel out of the ACA employer mandate as some claim BJC is doing, but as business advisor Juliana Reno observed on the PBS newshour earlier this evening:

If you, as an employer, try to crunch down hours below 30, you are going to lose some employees. The second problem is, it’s not going to cost you in terms of penalties, but it’s going to cost you a lot more in terms of recruiting and training and administrative stuff, because now you have to hire more employees to have the same amount of man hours worked.

As a consequence, economists don’t expect to see large numbers of employers who might be tempted to try this ploy – also bearng in mind that this part of the employer mandate affects only a small number of business to start with. Actually, if anti-Obamacare fanatics in congress would give the repeal-the-law refrain a rest and get down to some real work, glitches of this sort, insofar as they are a real problem, could be easily remedied.

But a note of caution: don’t expect the facts of the situation to keep GOPers like Rep. Wagner from desperately grasping at all potential anti-Obamacare straws. They’re starting to get frantic as Obamacare is set to become real – no longer the bogeyman in the next room, but soon to be a fairy godmother wavng a right-to-healthcare wand over the uninsured.

I wrote earlier about how Roy Blunt was making subtle signs that he didn’t really want to be associated with his party’s drive to shut down the government over Obamacare. Not so Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) who seems determined to go full tilt toward the crazy. Her stance is perhaps a bit surprising to those of us who detected a bit of GOP relief in the belief that they had fielded an almost sane replacement for erstwhile Rep. Todd Akin; Wagner impressed many as a smooth operator who could put a more respectable face on a party that is rapidly rebranding itself as home sweet home for rightwing kooks. Evidently, though, Wagner, even more than Blunt, sees her interests best served as red meat for the base.

Below the fold I reproduce the text of an email I received from Wagner in response to comments I sent her on shutting down the government in order to fight off the dread (to GOPers) Obamacare. The money portion of her effort to justfy her vote largely echoes press releases on her Web page and presents one of the most flagrant examples of political double-talk that I have ever seen:

With the deadline approaching to prevent a government shutdown  – the American people want Congress to do two things:  keep the government open and stop ObamaCare from destroying our economy, lowering the quality of our care and putting the Federal Government between you and your doctor.  That is why I voted last Friday to keep the government open, while protecting the people of the 2nd District from the devastating consequences of ObamaCare.  Now it is up to Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to answer the calls of the American people, and lead the fight in the Senate to defund ObamaCare and keep the government running.

Did you get that “I voted last Friday to keep the government open … “. Isn’t that like tellng frantic parents after you’ve kidnapped their children for a ransom too costly for them to pay, that you only took the kiddies to give the parents a chance to save them by paying up – ergo, you’re the one acting to keep the children well and safe. This is what I mean about trying to have your cake and eating it too – which we all know nobody can really manage to do.

And did you also get the note of seeming hero-worship Wagner directed toward toward Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee – the Senate hostage executioners who, according to Wagner’s reasoning, are also doing their best to keep the government operating by demanding a pound of bloody Obama flesh? Shouldn’t respectable, pearl-clutching “tradtionalist” Republicans shy away from nutjob demogogues?

Nothing, though, is actualy what it seems. Wagner’s shout-out to the chief Senate agitators on the topic may just be short-hand for “I did my part to impress the yahoos – now it’s your turn to bear the nasty load,” an indirect salvo in a “fight between House and the Senate — neither of whom want to be left holding the bag when this effort to defund Obamacare fails.” They all – and this where Wagner’s particularly cloying brand of cynicism manifests itself – want the savage Tea Partiers at home to think they did their best.

ADDENDUM: Here’s Ed Kilgore on the type of shutdown double-talk I reference above on the part of Ann Wagner:

What’s really bizarre is the effort (by Cruz at least) to pretend that Obama and/or congressional Democrats are responsible for risking a government shutdown or a debt default because they are (so far) refusing to make major concessions to the party that does not control the White House or the Senate. This cynical gambit needs to be mocked relentlessly. If Republicans evade total responsibility for the chaos currently gripping Washington, it will be a historic injustice. They lost the 2012 elections, and consequently their activists want to pitch a hissy fit and kick over as much furniture as possible. I wish someone could design a video game where they could work out their frustrations and recommit themselves to the imagined America of the distant past without ruining the neighborhood.

Wagner’s email missive – the survey link at the very bottom works if you want to let Wagner know what you think abou shutting down the  government:

Keeping the Government Open

Dear xxxxxx,

Do you remember when Nancy Pelosi said you had to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it?  Well – it didn’t take the American people long to find out what’s in ObamaCare: more taxes, fewer choices, skyrocketing premiums and unaffordable care.  

One of the main reasons I ran to be your Representative is because I believe ObamaCare needs to be repealed and replaced with free-market based solutions that expand access without destroying our economy and lowering the quality of our care.

As each day passes, more and more families are feeling the pain of Obamacare right here in the St. Louis region. Many of you might have heard a few days ago that BJC Healthcare can no longer afford to provide health insurance to its part-time employees. This is just another example of the coming economic disaster Obamacare poses when a large, highly respected healthcare company such as BJC Healthcare cannot afford healthcare for its own workers.

With the deadline approaching to prevent a government shutdown  – the American people want Congress to do two things:  keep the government open and stop ObamaCare from destroying our economy, lowering the quality of our care and putting the Federal Government between you and your doctor.  That is why I voted last Friday to keep the government open, while protecting the people of the 2nd District from the devastating consequences of ObamaCare.  Now it is up to Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to answer the calls of the American people, and lead the fight in the Senate to defund ObamaCare and keep the government running. Bear in mind that Cruz is either so unhinged or so determined to emerge as the Teajadist leader that he has excited the contempt of most of his Senate GOP colleagues:

As always – it is truly an honor to serve the people of the 2nd District, and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Sincerely,

Ann Wagner

Member of Congress

P.S. Take My Survey

Do you think we should shut down the government if the Senate fails to defund ObamaCare?

Yes

No

Via Politico we learn that Claire McCaskill seems to be feeling her oats when it comes to the threatened GOP government shutdown over their OCD efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA):

I don’t think in America we should throw tantrums when we lose elections and threaten to shut down the government and refuse to pay the bills,” the Missouri Democrat said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The American people had a choice last November. They had a choice between someone who said repeal Obamacare, and President Obama.”

[. . .]

“I cannot believe that they are gonna throw a tantrum and throw the American people and our economic recovery under the bus,” she said of Republicans. “It is really gonna hurt real people. And this is just political point-making.”

McCaskill was feeling so empowered that she characterized the GOP shutdown antics as “Akin-itis.” (Well … duh! Did anyone ever really think that Todd Akin was an isolated phenomenon in the party of Galloping Old Poops?)

McCaskill’s GOP opposite number, though, Senator Roy Blunt, has a different take as you might expet. Nevertheless, there are plenty of hints that he’s a bit squeamish when it comes to the floor-kicking, full-out tantrum that folks like Ted Cruz are promising:

Blunt has given no indication of siding with a determined element promising every rules trick to keep the anti-heath law offensive alive. Before that moment comes, all Republicans can weigh in heartily on the new law.

“I’m no supporter of the president’s health care plan. I believe it won’t work, there’s evidence every day of that, and I’ll vote to not move forward with it,” he said in a Friday interview.

He added: “I don’t know where we’ll be in the middle of the week.”

What could account for McCaskill’s political vim and vigor and Blunt’s cautious and worried tone? Could it be, as Robert Kuttner points out, that an unpopular shutdown is a dangerous ploy for vulnerable Republicans:

This very high-profile mess, just a year before next mid-term election, could upend assumptions about 2014. Democrats need to pick up just 17 seats to take back the House. Most analysts put the number of at-risk Republican seats at between 20 and 25, meaning that Democrats would need to run most of the table. But a deeper look suggests that more Republican seats could be vulnerable. In 2012, Republicans won 41 seats with 55 percent of the vote or less. If Democrats hold their own seats and win back even half of those, they take back the Majority.

Of course, for Blunt the issue probably also threatens to have even more tellling blowback: the people who employ him, his corporate cronies, are aghast at the reckless abandon of his more extreme Tea Party congressional colleagues. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has urged the GOPers to act in a more fiscally responsible manner. Even Wall Street recognizes the foolishness for what it is. The big money folks will fund any kind of stupidity as long as it gets pols sympathetic to their money-making needs into power. Where they draw the line, though, is when the stupidity spills over into financial lunacy – a fact that is surely not lost on Blunt. After all, as Slate’s John Dickerson puts it:

House Republicans aren’t just courting disaster. They’re helping President Obama make the case that they were the problem all along.

No wonder McCaskill is energized and Blunt suitably subdued.

There’s been lots of hot air on the topic of the Affordable Care Act (ACA – or Obamacare for those simple GOP folk who don’t already know they’re the same thing). The latest barricade errected against Obamacare by the GOP was a vote in the House last week that attached provisions to defund the ACA to a budgetary spending measure that would keep the government running. It takes Missouri’s own Rep. Billly Long (R-7), though, to sum up the two years of blather that have culminatead in this DOA gambit in four sentences (h/t the The Turner Report).

“When traveling my district I continue to hear from business owners and citizens who are burdened by this law and concerned about its impact on jobs.”

You can be forgiven if this blithe statement leaves  you scratching your head and trying to figure out what Billy could possibly mean. After all, it’s hard for anybody, even folks who were willing to vote for Ozark Billy, to be burdened by a law that hasn’t, apart from a few peripheral provisions, taken effect. The parts of the ACA that are already in effect – such as no copays for preventive health care and no more lifetime limits under current insurance plans, expanded coverage for adult children under 26 – aren’t really much of a burden to anyone except possibly insurance companies – and given the yearly salaries of most insurance CEOs, they can’t be hurting them too badly.

The Obamacare as job-killer myth has also been laid to rest repeatedly. A new report for the Center for Economic and Policy Research concludes that “There is really no evidence that the ACA has had any noticeable impact on employment growth.” But don’t expect our Republican friends to pay any attention to facts when fabrications serve their purposes so much better.

“My colleagues and I in the House have repeatedly backed our words with actions when it comes to Obamacare through our votes and committee work.”

This sentence is where our man of the people pats himself on his GOP back. It’s probably safe to conclude that Billy is referring to the 42 votes to repeal Obamacare that have taken place in the House – despite the fact that everyone and their grandmother knew that none of these votes would ever go any further and were a complete waste of time – apart from keeping the gullible anti-Obamacare GOP base riled up.  

“It is time for our colleagues in the Senate to back up their words with action when it comes to repealing Obamacare.”

Here Billy is asking the Senate to back up House Tea Partiers’ kamikaze fanasies about defunding Obamacare by refusing to pass contining budget resolutions or, down the line, refusing to raise the debt ceiling without anti-Obamacare language. Nevermind that nothing that has been proposed would necessarily halt Obamacare implementation – that ship has come and gone. The ACA could weather the government shutdown that would result from GOP hostage-taking tactics just fine. What would be hurt, though, would be significant swaths of vulnerable Americans, not to mention the country’s economic prospects. Want to kill job growth, shut down the government.

“I continue to believe the best course of action is to repeal this law and start from scratch.”

Feel like you’ve heard that before from more than one GOP mouthpiece? You have. And you and I already know just what starting “from scratch” means – the same ol’, same ol’ that we’ve heard from the GOP over the years: one-size-fits all tax credits, tort reform, buying insurance across state lines (while decimating consumer protections), high-risk pools:

… all the things that don’t actually don’t do anything to address the real problem in our health care system: the increasing, systemic cost of health care. But they don’t include any provision for lower-income people to purchase affordable insurance. They don’t include any of the popular Obamacare provisions, like young adults being able to stay on their parents’ plan or an end to lifetime limits on what insurance will pay.

So there you have it; GOP healthcare strategy in four pieces of lame boiler plate. But why are we being subjected to these efforts at self-justification in the wake of the GOP’s destructive, leave-no-hostages-alive vote last week? My impression of Billy Long is that he’s a go-along to get along kind of guy and right now the folks who reward him for going along are playing a dangerous game. Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas sum up the GOP’s motivation aptly:

There’s a cold logic behind the willingness of some conservatives to risk everything to stop Obamacare. But it’s not that Obamacare will fail. After all, if the law will just be a debacle, Republicans should let it take effect, ride the catastrophe to overwhelming victory in the 2014 midterms, and then use their massive congressional majorities to repeal it.

Rather, as E.J. Dionne writes, the real fear is that the law will succeed. Once Obamacare begins delivering health insurance to millions of Americans it will become effectively impossible to repeal. That’s what’s happened in every other country that’s introduced a national health-care system. That’s why the right needs to stop Obamacare before it begins.

Come 2016 (or maybe even by November 2014) when people are faced with hard evidence that Obamacare isn’t going to hurt at all, the characters who’ve been emitting all the high-pitched screams in order to incite the Tea Party mobs are going to look mighty stupid. So stupid that lots of voters might think twice about sending them back to Washington or Jefferson City.

Edited slightly for clarity; URL added in 4th from last paragraph.  

Early in August I wrote that among other state-level strategies to derail Obamacare:

GOP lawmakers have learned a thing or two from their “War on Women” strategy of regulating reproductive choice almost out of existence, and seem to be using the same regulatory approach to sabotage the Obamacare exchange. Otherwise religiously anti-regulation GOPers have decided that they must rigorously regulate individuals, known as navigators, hired to help Missourians use the exchanges lest they engage in “fraud.” And if they manage in the process to slow the information stream to a trickle, well, what can you do?

A recent Salon article by Brian Buetler makes it clear that this effort to keep reliable information from those who most need Obamacare has become a coordinated national-level strategy, directed toward those states with the most to loose, those that have the largest uninsured populations. Prominent among these states is Missouri which is now on the receiving end of both state-level and national-level Obamacare obstructionism:

For the most part, Republican state elected officials have undertaken the most direct efforts to stand between uninsured people and Obamacare – refusing to launch their own exchanges and expand Medicaid – while Republicans in federal office fight a more symbolic fight.

But now a group of House Republicans has crossed that line – by attempting to bog down Obamacare enrollment specialists in states with the highest uninsured populations, according to a new Salon analysis.

Last week, as several other outlets reported, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to state agencies and nonprofit groups that received Obamacare “navigator” grants – organizations that will help educate people about the law and facilitate their enrollment – seeking an incredibly broad and difficult-to-compile range of information.

In order to do the most harm, the House Republicans directed their inquiries to organizations in 11 states with larger uninsured populations than in other states – including Missouri. As Beutler notes, claims that the inquires are meant to protect the privacy of those using the exchanges ring hollow since the Committee members seem unconcerned with protecting the privacy of Obamacare exchange users in any of the remaining 39 states, instead, he writes, the “targeting scheme was meant to maximize bang for their buck.” Supporting this contention is the timing of the inquires; Beutler quotes Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA):

“The timing of these letters is particularly suspect,” Waxman wrote in a letter to Upton protesting the investigation. “You are insisting on voluminous document productions by September 13, just when these groups need to be focused on their mission of helping uninsured Americans enroll for coverage. Indeed, it appears that these requests may have been sent solely to divert the resources of small, local community groups, just as they are needed to help with the new health care law.”

This latest bit of flim-flam is only the most recent in a long string of efforts to derail the healthcare delivery reforms we democratically authorized in the election of 2008 and reaffirmed in 2012. The Republicans who were sent to do the people’s business in Washington D.C. have even descended to the level of trying to intimidate national sports franchises to keep them from helping publicize Obamacare benefits. This level of opposition is beyond cynical; it’s truly vile.

I am a cancer patient. Last Friday, I learned that I am, after a lengthy and complex treatment process involving two surgeries and seemingly endless chemotherapy, in remission. I happen to have access to good insurance and received truly excellent care. I cannot imagine what would have happened if I had been uninsured – although one thing I am sure of, given the nature of my particular cancer symptoms, is that I would have been diagnosed at an even later stage of the disease and I would likely be dead now, rendering questions of my ongoing care moot.

From this perspective, I not only want to know what is being done to counteract this disgusting effort to hurt real, actual people in the name of a trumped-up, long-discredited, rightwing ideology that sees efforts to use collective resources for public benefit as some type of suspect “socialism” that must be stopped at all costs. I also want to know who is going to publicize the evil perpetrated by Republican Obamacare fraudsters during the past few years. I want their names and their crimes on a publicly accessible list.

I want the Republicans in Missouri who have participated in these and other Obamacare charades, who have promulgated disinformation and outright lies to be held accountable in a way that hurts them as much as they have hurt the citizens of the state. I have never been an eye for an eye kind of person. I have always scoffed at the whining of crime victims who carry on as if they and they alone have the right to determine what punishment is adequate to the crimes carried out against them, but this time I want to know that Republicans who have participated in GOP’s descent into evil will have to pay.