Letter 2 America for July 15, 2014

Dear America,

I'm wondering if John Boehner knows something that the rest of us don't.  His latest antic is seeking approval from his Republican congress to sue President Obama for delaying implementation of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) requirement that businesses with more than fifty employees must provide affordable health insurance to those employees.  It is obviously subterfuge in that the Republican constituency is primarily business people, and the rich ones who own businesses with fifty or more employees are their biggest campaign donors, so the purpose of the suit cannot be to precipitate the enforcement of that provision, which will take some money out of the pockets of very rich, very powerful people...Republican people.  So what is it that Boehner hopes to accomplish?

I think the scenario plays out like this.  The suit goes to court, and like all other law suits involving purported constitutional issues, it will take some time to reach a court that can render a final decision, and in this case that will indubitably be the Supreme Court, which will not rule until the lower courts have.  So, no decision will be made in this case until at least the session beginning October 2015 when the Supreme Court session after the next one begins, which by coincidence is just ten months after the employer mandate will begin to be enforced.  And in the interim, there will be mid-term elections, and the Republicans will do anything to win more congressional seats in it, this lawsuit being one of them.  Thus, the decision isn't the main purpose of the suit in terms of the 2014 elections, but the fact of filing the suit is intended to bring the Tea Party types back into the fold.  It looks significant at first glance, and Boehner will try to divert everyone from looking too deep with more of his contrived nonsense about trusting President Obama, but it literally means nothing because by the time the next congress is seated, the deferment of the mandate will have ended, and the lawsuit will be moot.  All of the campaign noise about it will be a red herring and Boehner knows that as do all those Republicans on The Hill, so there must be a secondary purpose for this suit, and I think it is all in the timing.

The case won't get resolved until late 2015 most likely, but then only by a dismissal because it will be moot by then because the deferral ends on January 1, 2015.  But that dismissal will be just in time for the 2016 presidential election.  Of course, President Obama won't be an issue anymore since he can't run for reelection, but the ACA is characterized as big government and trampling on constitutional rights by the Republicans, so when the decision comes down, it will seem natural for those arguments to be resurrected just as they were in the 2012 presidential election; it won't seem artificial because it will just be reaction to either a good or a bad decision depending on which side you are on.  As a bonus, if the decision is earlier than 2015 and The President's deferment of the implementation of the "employer mandate," as it is called, is ruled to be a legal exercise of executive power, a bunch of businessmen who will then have to provide affordable insurance alternatives or pay $3,000 per employee will sue the federal government department that enforces the ACA just like the conservative attorneys general did, and like the Hobby Lobby Shop did relative to ACA mandated coverage of abortion procedures and medications. 

So this lawsuit is nothing but one more battle in a war of attrition.  It has no purpose other than to wear the Democrats and their progressive constituency down by dragging them through the courts over and over again.  And that strategy is necessary because with 8 million people already taking advantage of the ACA, and probably another several million doing so starting this fall in November for...you guessed it...2015, there will be a lot of people realizing that if they can't have a single-payer system, the ACA is a pretty good thing.  That will make the Republican effort to anathematize the ACA look misguided, or perhaps even disingenuous to all those newly insured and about to be insured people.  The suit is nothing but the Republicans scrambling to find something to commend them, and since they have no policies to invoke as things they stand for--since they have managed only to interdict the efforts of the Democrats to change things for the better--they are going to stick with what they know.  Despite their efforts to turn Benghazi into something with which to vituperate the Democrats, and since they are demanding that the President get all those kids back to Guatemala but refusing to give him the money to process those deportations as the law passed during the Bush administration requires, they really don't have anything but casuistry to work with.  And sooner or later, the electorate is going to recognize that fact.  So with this lawsuit, they can pretend that there is something with which to reproach the Democrats...something tested and effective, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

So once again, my fellow Americans, it is up to us to loudly repudiate a devious effort by the Republicans to mask their petty political motives with sound and fury signifying nothing.  If more of us begin to think with our own heads rather than someone else's, that just might work.

Your friend,

Mike