House Republicans passed repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), with loads of bluster about their doing the will of the people. But when you look at public opinion poll data, that support is “very soft indeed,” according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ in the Center for American Progress web pages.
…The fact is people like a great deal about the new health care reform law and are reluctant to give up these advances. Consider these results from the latest CBS/New York Times survey. Forty-eight percent of those polled said they preferred to let the new law stand compared to 40 percent who wanted to see it repealed. The latter figure is obviously significant and, in fact, has been up to 10 points higher in other surveys.
Turns out, however, that support for repeal gets downright mushy when respondents are asked “whether they would still support repeal if that meant insurance companies were no longer required to cover those with pre-existing medical conditions.” Teixeira adds, “This query reduced the number supporting complete repeal to just 21 percent.”
No matter how loudly House conservatives crow about their “victory,” the public is not ready to sign on this particular take-away, especially with no alternative to replace it.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
