Even if there is a government shutdown, it won’t delay the implementation of Obamacare, reports Linda Feldman at The Monitor: “The ACA is funded mostly through multiyear and mandatory spending, so a failure to agree on annual appropriations wouldn’t touch its funding.”
So here’s the GOP’s equally-doomed “Plan B” for killing Obamacare, according to Linda Mascaro of the L.A. Times: “Top Republicans want to get the legislation back to the House in time to give Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) an opportunity to attach new healthcare repeal amendments that might have a better chance at achieving GOP policy goals.”
Meanwhile, Erika Eichelberger reports at Mother Jones that “The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), known as the Motor Voter law, says that DMVs and other state agencies that provide public assistance have to provide voter registration services. The Obama administration has said that means that both the state-run exchanges, and the federally-run exchanges that are being rolled out in states where Republican governors have refused to set them up, will have to comply with the Motor Voter law. But now it appears that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is wavering on whether it will require the 35 federally-run exchanges to offer voter registration, according to a recent report by the left-leaning policy shop Demos and the voting rights organization Project Vote.”
At The Atlantic Molly Ball writes about the Heritage Foundation’s transformation from once-respected conservative think tank into a safe house for lowbrow partisan hackage.
From Emily Swanson’s HuffPo Politics post, “Americans Think GOP Mostly Helps the Rich“: “…According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll…51 percent of Americans think Republicans are most interested in helping the rich, while 28 percent said they’re most interested in helping the middle class. Another 7 percent said the GOP is most interested in helping the poor….Americans overall were roughly evenly divided on what they think the Democratic Party is up to. Twenty-eight percent said the party works for the rich, 27 percent said the middle class, and 25 percent said the poor.”
In his Op-Ed at The Hill Former Republican Senator Judd Gregg says: “Most Americans these days are simply ignoring Republicans. And they should. The self-promotional babble of a few has become the mainstream of Republican political thought. It has marginalized the influence of the party to an appalling degree.”
At Mother Jones, David Corn explains why “Obama is the most wily tactician in the nation’s capital since Lyndon Johnson.”
I’m not Sure Stefan Hankin has proved his thesis in his Washington Monthly post “How Democrats Lost the Colorado Recall Election.” But his argument is interesting: “A post-election analysis by the Atlas Project (here) determined that together the Democratic campaigns and outside groups had spent almost $2.3 million on both races, while their Republican counterparts merely spent a little over $500,000…This is not to say that the campaigns in Colorado should have given up TV advertising completely. However, in a low turnout election, in an off year, at an odd time, where mail ballots were not allowed, Democrats and their allies, decided to air 3,569 commercials instead of investing more resources in determining which voters they needed to turnout and which voters they needed to persuade to vote in these elections.”
The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman has a bit of a jaw-dropper in the title of his post, “Politico Published More than 30 Articles about Ted Cruz Today.” A good subtitle might have been “Bomb-Thrower Scams MSM with Nothingburger.” Waldman explains “most people who are not Republican activists/primary voters will within a few weeks forget what this whole thing was about. They’ll remember that that guy Cruz got up and talked for a long time, and it had something to do with Obamacare. And that’s about it.”