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The government is deciding this October on the nation’s debt limit, and this is leading some Republicans to make a preemptive strike on what they want done. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), for instance, vowed on Wednesday to push a bill that says Obamacare should be defunded or the government shut down. This decision was made after he had previously said he wished to avoid juxtaposing Obamacare with government shutdown, but after hearing tea party leaders talk of the issue over summer, he had decided to go ahead with his agenda.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called this an “absurd” play, the idea of “anarchists” from the tea party.
Congress decides its federal budge by Sept. 30, and Boehner has taken the opportunity to attack the health care plan that has long been the bane of Republicans. “We’re going to continue to do everything we can to repeal the president’s failed health care law,” Boehner said, as reported by the Huffington Post. ”This week, the House will pass the CR [continuing resolution] that locks the sequester savings in and defunds Obamacare.”
“We’ve got a lot of divergent opinions in the caucus,” said Boehner, but seems to favor tea party initiatives. “I was here in the Gingrich era. He had a little plaque that was in his office. It’s a management model: ‘Listen, learn, help and lead.’ We listened to our colleagues over the last week. We have a plan that they’re happy with. We’re going forward.”
Though the Supreme Court failed to take down Obamacare, it still has its enemies; meanwhile, the funding of the government is an even more important issue.
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Reid raised his disdain against Republican gestures at government shut down, saying, “We’re now waiting to see what the House of Representatives is going to do, how absurd it’s going to be, what they’re going to send us. We know it’s going to be something really strange and weird because the speaker has to do everything he can to mold a piece of legislation that will meet the needs of the tea party — the anarchists — and I say that without any equivocation. They do not want government to work on any level.”
How the incipient decision on debt limit will play out depends in part how the different factions relate so such gestures at anarchy as this; and though it is perhaps unlikely that either Obamacare or the government will be shut down, pressing a bill in that direction is not completely meaningless.
