As noted, they can’t get the entire bill thrown out on constitutional grounds. But getting certain parts of the bill declared unconsititional can be the first step to that end. As Chronos notes, throwing out the individual mandate makes many other parts of the bill unworkable (like prohibiting companies from denying coverage for existing conditions). So once the individual mandate is out for example, Republicans can put the rest of it up for a vote, and suddenly a lot of Dems that were wavering might switch sides.
Not exactly; they’d present it as “Yes, I want to save money by not paying for other people’s pre-existing conditions.” Not saying that’s just in any absolute sense, but that’s the approach one would take politically.
Right, but they tried this rhetoric with Social Security and Medicare in the past without much success. Seems people get used to these things and then get very hesitant to rock the boat, regardless of all the doubtful promises of what a free market can do for them.
Just a couple years ago the #1 agenda on the GOP was to privatize Social Security. If they couldn’t do that with all their Bush-era political power, then I’m skeptical they’re going to make inroads on abolishing this bill, even with their theoretical maximum wins.
This all reminds me of the public protest of the recent stimulus package in public by GOP members but in their local districts they happily handed out the money to their constituents with great fanfare. Rhetoric only gets you so far, and people are already skeptical of it.
I apologize if this has already been posted, but here is the partisan breakdown for the Senate for the seats expiring in 2011.
There are 34 senators whose terms will expire. Of them 16 are held by the Democrats and 18 by the Republicans.
Therefore, if the Republicans win every available seat, they will have, beginning in 2011, 56 seats, leaving the Democrats with the remaining 44.
Barring any deaths or resignations, it is impossible for the Republicans to obtain a veto-proof majority, nor can they get a filibuster-proof one.
Here is a list of all the states with seats up for election in 2010 with the party that currently holds the seat:
Arkansas Democratic
California Democratic
Colorado Democratic
Connecticut Democratic
Hawaii Democratic
Illinois Democratic
Indiana Democratic
Maryland Democratic
Nevada Democratic
New York Democratic
North Dakota Democratic
Oregon Democratic
Pennsylvania Democratic
Vermont Democratic
Washington Democratic
Wisconsin Democratic
Alabama Republican
Alaska Republican
Arizona Republican
Florida Republican
Georgia Republican
Idaho Republican
Iowa Republican
Kansas Republican
Kentucky Republican
Louisiana Republican
Missouri Republican
New Hampshire Republican
North Carolina Republican
Ohio Republican
Oklahoma Republican
South Carolina Republican
South Dakota Republican
Utah Republican
So it seems the only way to repeal the bill wholesale would be after the 2012 elections, where Republicans would need win the Presidency, a majority in the House and a super-majority in the Senate. They’d then need to convince those congressmen to repeal the entire bill, which would involve re-opening the doughnut hole, allowing insurers to reinstate rescissions and discriminate against pre-existing conditions, and take away subsidies, among other things. Aside from how unlikely those election results are, that second part wouldn’t be easy either. The bottom line is that a wholesale repeal of the entire bill is simply not going to happen. It’s mainly a political strategy I think - “a vote for us in November is a vote for repealing the bill!” type of thing. (Another way to repeal the bill would have been to challenge the constitutionality of the process, specifically the ‘deem and pass’ method in the House, but the House didn’t use deem and pass in the end.)
It seems to me that the only viable option for the bill’s opponents is to challenge the constitutionality of certain key provisions, like the individual mandate. If that gets knocked out by the courts there would have to be some emergency changes, such as implementing a different version of the individual mandate or, I suppose, repealing all the other provisions in the bill. But basically I think so many provisions of the bill are so popular (Republicans like Scott Brown, Rudy Giuliani and Judd Gregg have been talking about some of the provisions they wouldn’t seek to repeal today) that removing them now is going to be impossible.
They could also do it without winning the Presidency if they manage to get 67 seats in the Senate (rather than 60 required to preclude the filibuster.) There are 21 Democrats up for reelection in 2012, plus the “independents” Jeffords & Lieberman—remember that 2006 was a particularly good year for the Dems—so it’s conceivable that they could swing it. To do that still requires them to win something like, say, 11 seats this time around and 15 seats in 2012. This assumes, of course, that they don’t lose any seats in either election; this seems unlikely at this point, but maybe voters will forget about John Ensign’s scandals and Scott Brown will turn out to be that rare creature, a long-lived Massachusetts Republican.
Of course, any scenario with a political climate that’s pro-Republican enough to allow for such a sweep would probably give the Republicans the presidency as well, but it’s still an interesting scenario to think about.