Here in Missouri, we’ve sent a group of GOPers to Washington who all have in common the fact that they demonstrate considerable spleen when it comes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Billy Long (R-7th), for example, has bizarrely characterized the ACA as a “purely socialist single-payer healthcare system unlike anything the nation has ever experienced before.” Nor is Billy alone. Next Tuesday it is probably safe to assume that all of our Missouri GOP House members will stand with the rest of their party and vote to repeal the “job-killing” ACA.

Of course this vote amounts to nothing more than political theater, meant to assuage the GOP Tea Party foot soldiers. The bill will go nowhere in the Senate and, if by some fluke it did, it’s a sure bet that the President would veto it. Nevertheless, no matter what else you may think of them, Grand Old Partiers are no fools; they can see as well as anyone else that the anti-Obamacare ruckus they ignited could get out of hand if they don’t follow-up on the fire-and-brimstone they served up to susceptible Tea Partiers. They may soon, however, find themselves between a rock and hard place when it comes time to take credit for this sad piece of performance art.

It’s that “job-killing” part, particularly as it pertains to small businesses, that could trip them up. GOP pols and fellow-traveling lobbyists have been loudly proclaiming that the ACA will be poison for small businesses. Just do a search on “small business” and “Obamacare” and you’ll encounter a plethora of articles replete with doomsday predictions. Roy Blunt actually promised to repeal the ACA as one of the lynch pins of his putative jobs-plan during his Senate campaign last fall. Ultimately, though, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Which is why it is interesting to note that small businesses are rushing to take advantage of the provisions of the ACA.  The Los Angeles Times reports that:

Major insurers around the country are reporting that a growing number of small businesses are signing up to give their workers health benefits, a sign of potential progress for the nation’s battered healthcare system. …

An important selling point has been a tax credit that the nation’s new healthcare law provides to companies with fewer than 25 employees and moderate-to-low pay scales to help offset the cost of providing benefits. The tax credit is one of the first few provisions to kick in; much of the law rolls out over the next few years

To take an example close to home, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Kansas City, Mo. reports a 58% increase in small businesses buying insurance for their employees. Thirty-eight percent of those businesses had never offered their workers insurance before. As for those mandates and reporting requirements that many deplore, Rick Ungar of Forbes’ The Policy Page nails it:

If these small businesses found the new law to be so onerous, why have so many of them voluntarily taken advantage of the benefits provided in the law to give their employees these benefits? They were not mandated to do so. And to the extent that the coming mandate obligations might figure into their thinking, would you not imagine they would wait until 2014 to make a move as the rules do not go into effect until that time?

Nor, with apologies to Billy Long, is the ACA proving to be especially “socialistic.” Actually, the folks who might be contributing most to an anti-business climate may be the Republicans with their constant posturing on the topic of the ACA.  As Ezra Klein puts it:

… the health-care industry is having to balance investments that it wants to make against the concern that Republicans will repeal the bill and yank away those opportunities. Before the election, John Boehner said employers “are afraid to invest and hire in an economy stalled by ‘stimulus’ spending and hamstrung by uncertainty.” Now he’s the guy stringing the hams

I wouldn’t be too surprised, as long as Democrats play their cards right, if next Tuesday might be remembered as the day when the GOP tried to effect the job-killing repeal of the Health Care Act, rather than a vote to repeal the job-killing health care act.

MORE:  Steve Benen has a similar take  on the Republican ACA repeal effort. Interesting quotes he includes:

As Kevin Drum noted a couple of weeks ago, “[I]t really is possible that both the healthcare sector and the business community in general, after they take a look at what kind of chaos might ensue from ad hoc partial defunding, will put some real pressure on Republicans to stand down on this. That would be an interesting turn of events, no?”

The WSJ report added, “Talking about repeal of the health law may be a winning political strategy for Republicans, a rare way to please both workers and business executives. As long as they don’t actually succeed in doing it.”

Despite all the noise about Roy Blunt’s nasty little subliminal “Robin-Carnahan supports 9/11 terrorists” message, the really big news for progressives yesterday was a tweet from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Tony Messenger:

News from @robincarnahan: the dedmocrat [sic] says she supports extending ALL the Bush tax cuts. “now is not the time to raise taxes, she says.

As unexpected as a slap in the face from your friendly neighborhood grocery clerk. In both cases there can be only one response: Why?

Duanne Graham, in his excellent blog, The Erstwhile Conservative, suggests that because progressives really hate Roy Blunt, Carnahan thinks she’s got us between a rock and a hard place and can afford to diss us in order to go after the knee-jerk center. Graham speculates that she thinks that she has more to gain by courting folks who are more easily bamboozled by the “biggest tax increase ever” fiction disseminated by Republicans fighting tooth and nail to keep the good times rolling for their wealthy constituency.

Maybe Graham’s right, or maybe Carnahan really has had a change of heart and is acting from conviction. Personally, I’d rather believe that she’s trying to be strategic rather than that she’s stupid; and Graham’s contentions about her “triangulating” ploy seem at least somewhat credible when we consider that, as the The Hill  reports, this is a rather sudden change in her position:

In a February radio interview, Carnahan had said she favored extending tax cuts for the middle-class but not for the wealthiest Americans. She said then that the nation couldn’t afford it.

Carnahan said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press that her position has evolved because of an additional six months of difficult economic times, which she blamed on policies backed by Blunt.

Excuse me! Am I hearing correctly? Carnahan wants to fix a recession caused by policies backed by Blunt and his BushCo gang by continuing those same policies?  If we couldn’t afford these tax cuts then, how can we afford them now? Please, Ms. Carnahan, I would just love to know what you’re thinking – or, alternatively, what you’ve been smoking.

I have also heard stories that Carnahan might parse this support for the upper bracket tax cuts a little more narrowly, claiming that she believes that if they expire, it might hurt small businesses whose success conventional wisdom deems essential to recovery. This line is also, incidentally, the exact position that is currently being pushed by Senate Republicans.

Will increasing the top bracket from 35% to 39.5% actually discourage small businesses from expanding and hiring? Writing for The Christian Science Monitor, Howard Gleckman demonstrates that the increase will actually affect only affect a very small number of business that have a positive business income of over $700,000 – and that whether or not it will slow their job creation is moot. Surely Carnahan knows this? *

Even if one truly believes that letting the top bracket cuts expire would harm small businesses, there are alternative, less costly approaches. As Alan E. Binder, Professor of economics at Princeton University and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board remarks:

Some tax-cut enthusiasts — showing signs of latent Keynesianism — have pointed out that all tax increases reduce spending, which is not what we want now. They’re right. That’s why any higher taxes should be paired with policies that more than replace the lost spending. Examples abound. We could raise unemployment benefits, as was recently done. Or boost food stamps. Or help hard-pressed state and local governments forestall layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters. Dollar for dollar, these and other options would more than offset the spending lost by letting the tax cuts expire.

Isn’t this the type of economic policy we progressives think that Democrats like Carnahan ought to stand up for? Of course, it’s difficult to explain in sound-bites, so she might loose the center to the tax-and-spend slogans that Blunt tosses around with  such abandon.

There is, though, another side to the coin. There’s been lots of talk recently about the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, and watching our candidates parrot intellectually weak, Republican talking points will do little to bridge it.

* URL added.