Also Too, Unicorns

Not buying this on its surface:

Over the last week, the signals have been abundant that congressional Republicans are pivoting from their total opposition to “Obamacare” toward supporting the more popular chunks of the law.

It’s an election-year strategy to mitigate the fallout if the Supreme Court grants them their wish and strikes down the law next month. The House GOP is weighing a replacement plan to reinstate its more popular components, such as guaranteeing coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions, letting people under 26 stay on a parent’s policy and closing the Medicare “doughnut hole.”

That may be what they're saying, but they're not going to propose any of those things---at least not in the forms that are being advertised. What you'll see coming from these clowns are a bunch of individual bills aimed at reinstating each of the Affordable Care Act's most popular provisions, and each bill will have a number of "poison pill" amendments attached to it---a rider permitting open carry on commercial airliners, or a rider creating a national Birth Certificate registry, or a rider defining abortion as a form of "domestic terrorism": In other words, proposals that they know Democrats can never vote for in good conscience. So the kabuki plays out: Republicans will vote unanimously in favor of these bills, Democrats will vote (mostly) unanimously against, the bills will die in the Senate, and Republicans will blame the Democrats for killing off the best parts of health-care reform.

Whatever approach they take, the Teabillies are not going to co-opt liberal health-care policy just because it's an election year, they're going to sabotage it---and use it as a tool to embarrass the opposition. Because if there's one thing these people like even better than winning, it's humiliating liberals. Sadism is baked into their psychic DNA; it's a signifier that defines their worldview.

And you know what? They'll probably be successful with this tactic. They can always rely on some headline writer at the Post or the Times to frame the narrative as "Senate Dems Vote Down Under-26 Health Coverage," and they can always bitch to the editors of Politico if the coverage doesn't suit them; and all the Serious Persons in Washington will shake their heads disapprovingly and wonder why Democrats can't find a commonsense middle ground with Republicans, and this is why we need Generalissimo Bloomberg, etc.

But either way, I really wish the President's supporters would try to stop spinning the impending nullification of the Affordable Care Act into some P.R. victory for the White House when the likeliest possible outcome in the court of public opinion is the exact and diametric opposite.

---Vitelius