Note to GOP: To defeat Obamacare

Follow Captain Kirk, not the Tea Party

In The Corbomite Maneuver, the captain of a huge, overwhelmingly powerful alien ship gives Captain Kirk and his crew 10 minutes "to make preparations" with any deities they revere. Then, he will destroy the Enterprise—and them. Asked for options, Mr. Spock replies (short form), "checkmate." Kirk pauses, turns, and says, "Not chess, Mr. Spock. POKER!" From there, the episode follows an interesting path to a favorable ending.

If Republicans in Congress want to win the battle over Obamacare, they need to stop "tilting at windmills" and start playing poker! It might help if they realized they hold a much stronger hand than does the President.

President Obama's clearly unconstitutional postponement of the Act’s "Employer Mandate" evidences the stronger Republican hand. Fearing the electoral backlash from the economic horrors his "ivory tower" brainchild would unleash, President Obama conveniently "postponed" the Employer Mandate until safely after the 2014 election. If Republicans can get close enough to overturning that delay, the President will soon enter into "fruitful negotiations" that (will ultimately lead to) "useful improvements" in the Affordable Care Act—improvements the President no doubt “always expected to make”; and for which he will probably attempt to take credit.

To bring the President to the bargaining table, the GOP should push the following "chips" into “the middle of the table”:
1. Have a group, ideally made up of democrats, independents, and as few republicans as necessary, file suit to enjoin the President from delaying the Employer Mandate. It would be nice to have former supporters of the Act lead the suit. Examples might include James Hoffa, Junior, Warren Buffet and a few suddenly concerned former and current Democrat Senators and Representatives who actually voted for the Bill.
2. Pass ten to twenty individual House bills—no riders, no pork, and no side issues—implementing the best of the myriad GOP healthcare reform proposals.
3. Tell the American People why the House passed the new, substantive improvements; and why their proposals are better than the Act.

The day any court grants, or looks ready to grant, an injunction requiring implementation of the employer mandate, President Obama will find himself facing an electoral tsunami. (Why else did he postpone the Mandate?) That possibility would almost surely lead to the President quickly scrambling for a deal.

If you agree with the ideas expressed here, I hope you will share them with your legislative representatives, your friends, and even your relatives. For consistency, let’s just tell the Republicans to perform, “The Obamanite Maneuver!”


DJ



Addendum
You might wonder what I meant by, “clearly unconstitutional postponement of the ‘Employer Mandate’".
1. The postponement violates the Separation of Powers, a key foundation of our Constitution, our Government, and a pillar of our freedom:   o Changing such a key provision of the Act amounts to legislating; President Obama has no authority to legislate.
   o To this observer’s knowledge, nothing in the act allowed any President to postpone or unilaterally change any key parts of the Act; if any did, future Republican presidents could, in effect, nullify the Act via an executive order or a regulation.
   o The Supreme Court found the Act Constitutional under the taxing authority of Congress. Postponing the Employer Mandate amounts to the President unilaterally changing tax law; imagine if George W. Bush had changed the tax rates in 2001 via regulation rather than a vote of Congress.
2. One could argue that treating one class of tax payers—businesses—more favorably than another class—individuals—violates the “Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment. While perhaps a stretch, that clause all too often seems to resemble the proverbial “rubber man” at a circus.