Mitt Romney is back.
On Tuesday, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate emerged from political exile as a party elder and a voice for calm to the brewing storm between the White House and the Tea Party over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).
During a speech at a fundraiser in New Hampshire, Romney sought to defuse a charge led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R – Texas) that seeks to defund the government — which would result in a shutdown — unless the health care law is defunded.
“I badly want Obamacare to go away, and stripping it of funds has appeal. But we need to exercise great care about any talk of shutting down government,” Romney said. “I’m afraid that in the final analysis, Obamacare would get its funding, our party would suffer in the next elections, and the people of the nation would not be happy.”
Politicians seeking to defund the ACA feel that by refusing to support any continuing resolutions or stopgap funding that would finance the government after the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30, it would force the Democrats and the White House to choose the lesser poison between shutting down the entire government and shutting down just the ACA. Attempts to shut down the ACA have been the overwhelming agenda for the Republican-led House; the lower chamber has voted to delay or repeal all or a part of the bill 40 times so far. Most recently, the House passed a bill prohibiting the IRS from implementing the law.
The House, however, has been repeatedly foiled in its attempts by the Democrat-controlled Senate.
“The dumbest idea I’ve ever heard”
“The ultimate ‘power of the purse’ still resides in the House, and the House will soon act to fund the government,” conservative groups wrote to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R – Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). “Obamacare interferes with the doctor-patient relationship. It continues to raise health insurance premiums and explode the national debt. And, even as our economy continues to struggle, the law’s new job-killing rules, regulations, and taxes will only continue to ratchet up as time goes on.”
Many, however, feels that this idea is, in the kindest terms, misguided. First, while the House does have the constitutional prerogative to introduce spending bills exclusively, it does not have the ability to pass them unilaterally. The House must still convince the Senate and the White House to approve the measure. Second, as reported by the Congressional Research Service, the Department of Health and Human Services’ contingency plan for a government shutdown states that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services will continue ACA activities uninterrupted in the case of an absence of funding due to a mandatory funding requirement written into the law itself.
“And let’s say you do [pass a continuing resolution (CR) defunding the ACA], and the president vetoes the CR. Then what happens? How fast do members of Congress who voted for that strategy fold when the government shuts down?” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told The Washington Post. “I’ve been here when we’ve done that, and it’s not a strategy that works. This is misleading the conservative base because it’s not achievable, and all it will do in the long run is dispirit the base. This is a failed strategy for conservatives.”
Sen. Richard Burr (R – N.C.) called the defunding plan the “dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” “As long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be the law.” Burr was a member of the Senate during the 1995 government shutdown, which scuttled the Republicans’ Contract With America. Boehner feels that this attack on ACA is flawed and can only reflect poorly on the Republicans in next year’s midterm elections as voter frustration for the legislative roadblock will be aimed solely at the GOP.
One last shot
The Congressional Conservatives’ argument is that while they cannot starve the ACA to death, they can seriously curtail it via defunding. As explained by Henry Aaron for the New England Journal of Medicine, “Customarily, substantive legislation ’authorizes’ spending, but the funds to be spent must be separately ‘appropriated.’ The ACA contains 64 specific authorizations to spend up to $105.6 billion and 51 general authorizations to spend ‘such sums as are necessary’ over the period between 2010 and 2019. None of these funds will flow, however, unless Congress enacts specific appropriation bills.
“In addition, section 1005 of the ACA appropriated $1 billion to support the cost of implementation in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). This sum is a small fraction of the $5 billion to $10 billion that the Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government will require between 2010 and 2019 to implement the ACA. The ACA appropriated nothing for the Internal Revenue Service, which must collect the information needed to compute subsidies and pay them. The ACA also provides unlimited funding for grants to states to support the creation of health insurance exchanges (section 1311). But states will also incur substantially increased administrative costs to enroll millions of newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries. Without large additional appropriations, implementation will be crippled.”
However, as the ACA appropriations are codified by law, they are not discretionary and therefore cannot be defunded. Only matching legislation can change the ACA’s funding levels. Despite this, the Tea Party is pursuing this option as the final chance to shut down the ACA prior to its Jan. 1 implementation.
This reality has created a noticeable split in the GOP. Sen. Mike Lee (R – Utah) dismissed Romney’s statements, stating that the conservative’s ACA strategy is a legitimate attempt to protect the populace from this law. “This is not a left vs. right issue. It is Washington and the politically powerful vs. the people,” Lee said in a statement. Meanwhile, Rep. Robert Pittenger (R – N.C.) was forced to explain to a Tea Party supporter his rejection of the Tea Party-backed effort at a Monday town hall:
“Why do you fight a battle you can’t win? We’d lose over there [in the Senate], then they’d come back to us in the House,” Pittenger said. ”We look at your battle, but we look at every battle and how we can win. How do we get the Democrats on defense? We passed ‘no budget, no pay.’ What did that do? That forced them to go back to pass the first budget they’d written in four years…It turned the debate around.”
Shooting the messenger
Romney’s advice to the GOP, however, may be mitigated by the person giving it. As Romney admitted, “I do have some advice for us as a party. I know, I lost. I’m probably not the first person you’d ask for advice,” he said. “But because we all learn from our mistakes, I may have a thought or two of value.”
The former Massachusetts governor, in recent days, had struggled in justifying his pandering on multiple fronts during his presidential run and inconsistencies on his stance. In an interview with Dan Balz, published July 27 in The Washington Post, Romney defended his infamous “47 percent” quote:
“As I understood it, and as they described it to me, not having heard it, it was saying, ‘Look, the Democrats have 47 percent, we’ve got 45 percent, my job is to get the people in the middle, and I’ve got to get the people in the middle,’ ” he said. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s a reasonable thing.’ . . . It’s not a topic I talk about in public, but there’s nothing wrong with it. They’ve got a bloc of voters, we’ve got a bloc of voters, I’ve got to get the ones in the middle. And I thought that that would be how it would be perceived — as a candidate talking about the process of focusing on the people in the middle who can either vote Republican or Democrat. As it turned out, down the road, it became perceived as being something very different.”
When asked if he was insensitive to a whole class of people, he responded, “Right.”
“And I think the president said he’s [Romney’s] writing off 47 percent of Americans and so forth. And that wasn’t at all what was intended. That wasn’t what was meant by it. That is the way it was perceived … But when you said there are 47 percent who won’t take personal responsibility … Actually, I didn’t say that. . . .That’s how it began to be perceived, and so I had to ultimately respond to the perception, because perception is reality.”
On May 2012, in a closed-to-the-press fundraiser in Florida, Romney said,
“And so my job is not to worry about those people — I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.”
It is in these seeming contradictions that Romney falls flat. Typically, a failed presidential candidate takes some time away from the public’s eye, reflects on what he did wrong, and, if he returns, offers advice to help others avoid the same pitfalls that entrapped him. In Romney’s case, there is the suspicion that he refuses to recognize his own failings, which, in this highly polarized political environment, makes his argument for being the voice of moderation that much harder to accept, especially among fellow Republicans.
Romney is, after all, responsible for the Massachusetts Health Connector program, which has led the state to be one of the healthiest in the Union and on which the ACA was based.
Romney has hinted that he will campaign for the Republicans in the 2014 midterm elections.