It seems to me that there were two logical ways to have avoided this situation, after the House sent over the CR with the Obamacare year delay and the provision to remove the medical device tax...
The first one would have been if Reid had moved a little off his "absolutely nothing but a clean CR" position, and gone ahead and had the Senate vote on a CR that removed the Obamacare individual mandate delay, but kept the lifting of the tax on medical devices. (This would have made him look like he was "going the extra mile from a PR standpoint; while really not giving up very much. There's widespread bipartisan agreement in both Houses that this tax was an ill conceived idea for a lot of reasons, it's very likely to be eliminated anyway.)
It would have been good from a PR standpoint for Obama too. He could have stood up and said, "I've said all along that I'm certainly open to suggestions on how to improve the legislation, so long as they did not involve attempting to repeal or gut the ACA. I can accept this measure as meeting that criteria, and while I'm strongly opposed to tying any kinds of conditions to the CR, in the interest of sparing the country the pain of a government shutdown, I will go the extra mile and sign a CR containing this provision."
That would have put the House GOP in the position of either accepting that, or having to go on the record for voting down the repeal of the medical device tax, and making the optics of it crystal clear that they and they alone were the ones who wouldn't budge.
That not having happened, the second logical way to have avoided this,would have been for the House, after the Senate rejected their version of the CR, to have sent over another one that removed the year delay on Obamacare, but retained the medical device tax elimination...
That would have put Reid in a very difficult spot because he would have been under a lot of pressure from members in his own caucus to accept a CR under those circumstances despite his "no compromises on the CR" position, and I think ultimately he would have had to allow that to come to a vote and it would have passed overwhelmingly.
But of course neither of these logical, intelligent things happened...
Instead what happened was something so puzzlingly stupid that as much as I have wracked my brains about it I can not conceive of what the possible rational strategy could have been for it, even taken from the most narrow ideological perspective I can postulate...
What happened of course was that the House GOP left the Obamacare delay
in the bill, but switched out the medical device tax repeal, and replaced it with a provision removing exemptions from Obamacare from members of Congress and their staffs. A proposal which (unlike the medical device tax repeal, which would achieve some actual, tangible, good) has an economic impact either way so infinitesimal as to be virtually unmeasurable. It was the kind of empty symbolism that the vast majority of Americans probably don't give a rat's patootie about...
I am at a complete loss to understand why they did this. if the whole thing wasn't so serious it would be downright comical...
It's sort of like a chef who serves a customer a shit sandwich with a side order of fries, and when it get's returned to the kitchen says to himself, "Ah I know what the problem is. He obviously doesn't like fries. I'll send it back out to him with a side order of onion rings, and everything will be fine..."
It seems to me that rather then waste the time and effort of sending back a bill that had absolutely zero chance of being accepted, they could have made themselves look less ridiculous after they voted down the second clean CR the Senate sent back by not holding another vote. They could have said:
"Look, we sent over a CR that would have defunded Obamacare, and the Senate refused to accept it. So we sent over a second CR this time only asking that individuals be granted the same one year delay that the President has already given to businesses, and they wouldn't accept that. In addition they have refused to make any kind of counter proposal whatsoever. As far as we're concerned we've shown good faith that we want to bring an end to this impasse, and the Senate hasn't, so the ball remains in the Senate's court."
Now, I'm sure that most people here would take issue with the position I just outlined as one the GOP House members could have taken, (I'm not all that persuaded by it myself) and say well, that takes things out of context, it's not a fair construction of the larger picture, etc.
But nevertheless it's a
much better position from a PR standpoint then what they actually did, and it would certainly have made them look less ridiculous....
However it's quite evident at this point that "try to look less ridiculous" does not occupy a prominent place on many "To Do" lists in Washington these days...
