How to silence GOP nuts — and stop the Obamacare repeal campaign [View all]

[DonViejo]

One still-plausible scenario could stop attacks on the president's "You can keep it" comment dead in its tracks

BRIAN BEUTLER

Nobody, not even President Obama is pretending that the rollout of the Affordable Care Act has been anything but a debacle.

Reading headlines in the national press, though, you’d get the impression that repeal is right around the corner. For that to be true, though, several dozen House Democrats and over a score of Democrats in the Senate would have to be willing to vote with Republicans to override a veto. And even under these miserable circumstances, only 39 House Dems, overrepresented by representatives of swing districts, voted with Republicans for the so-called “Upton bill,” to allow health insurance carriers to restore canceled policies and sell them to new comers outside of the Obamacare exchanges. A bad bill, but not full repeal

Dems aren’t anywhere close to a tipping point, even if things don’t get better soon. Just to be sure though (and at the risk of being meta) I asked Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn, about this on MSNBC this Saturday. Here’s what he had to say.

“There’s enough Democrats who…politically are going to support the president, philosophically are going to support the law [that] I can’t see a veto proof number coming up,” he said. “I just don’t see that happening. But you’ve gotta remember, we just put off the budget, put off the sequester, we didn’t cure that problem we put it off. So you’ve got some real problems coming up in January and in December with budget numbers and the sequester. So there’s a lot of problems that can arise. But the bottom line is that Democrats are going to be vulnerable to Republican attacks on the Affordable Care Act regardless. I understand why those 39 voted the way they did. But I think the rest of the caucus is pretty strong and will stick with the president and support him and support the Affordable Care Act.”

Full article + video:
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/18/how_to_silence_gop_nuts_and_stop_the_obamacare_repeal_campaign/