As Jonathan Strong writes below, House Republican leaders are making it fairly clear that they don’t plan to challenge the implementation of Obamacare during this fall’s continuing resolution, the legislation to fund government operations in the absence of a budget. But he notes that Republicans are looking ahead to their other major opportuntity this fall, when the Treasury hits the debt ceiling in October or November. Reuters reported Tuesday night that House leadership was considering using that point “as leverage to try to delay the law’s implementation”; the Huffington Post spoke to an aide from majority leader Eric Cantor’s office who hinted at a similar strategy, saying, it’s “not repeal” but “potentially the individual mandate delay and codifying the business mandate delay — and perhaps other aspects” that they’re looking at.
When this got out, Ezra Klein, predictably, had a cow, writing in his morning newsletter Wednesday that House leadership is trying “to one-up the crazies” by proposing this as an alternative to the Cruz-Lee defunding strategy, a trade he compares to “trading the flu for septic shock.” But that’s not exactly what’s going on: House leadership, as they made clear to Reuters and HuffPo, aren’t exactly just trading one leverage point, defunding, for another, the debt ceiling.
They’re using this leverage point to ensure that the CR funds the government at sequester levels (lower than the president and Democrats want), and they’re substantially reducing their ask when the Obamacare debate comes up: Not total delay or defunding of the law, but delay of discrete parts of it, such as the individual mandate, that they think would be both substantively worthwhile and politically advantageous. Why exactly House leadership is insisting on moving this fight to the debt ceiling rather than the continuing resolution isn’t clear, and does present a problem if they’re serious about trying to get an Obamacare delay: Klein is exactly right that the debt ceiling is a much bigger bomb to set than the CR (though next time Republicans really do threaten to shut down the government, you can bet liberals will compare it to a lot worse than a case of the flu). Thus, House leadership is almost definitely not actually willing to let it go off, because they understand the economic consequences could well be as bad as Klein says they would be; their strategy resides on convincing Democrats that they can’t control their own caucus.
Thus, it’s not even clear the debt-ceiling threshold is actually a politically credible threat anymore for Republicans, and they capitulated on it, albeit for a shorter period of time, last time it came up – so why pick the Obamacare fight over it rather than government funding? One possibility is that this is an attempt to thoroughly snuff out the Cruz-Lee strategy, which was focused on using the CR (although one of the main proponents, Heritage Action, makes it clear in defining the strategy that they’ve thought of using the debt ceiling too), in part by emphasizing that Republicans will still get something out of the CR (locking in lower spenidng levels). Another is that Boehner is trying to split up his fights: As he explained in the call Jonathan reported on below, he knows the president and Democrats don’t want to stick to the sequester funding levels Republicans prefer, and that will require some effort in the CR fight, even if it’s for just a short-term resolution (though each month at sequester levels, of course, makes them more likely to stick and more expensive-looking to reverse). If so, Boehner either wants to keep the sequester levels of spending more than he wants to fight Obamacare, or, much more likely, he sees keeping the sequester as a more practicable accomplishment than delaying the president’s health-care law. In any case, for better or for worse, leadership is planning to use its better chip, it seems, on spending rather than Obamacare delay.