Former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said Thursday that his party should work with Democrats to fix Obamacare if the Supreme Court rules to invalidate premium tax credits on the federally-run insurance exchange.
“I would think they should work at that,” the Mississippian, who’s now a lobbyist for Patton Boggs, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, arguing that technical corrections to major legislation are routine. “Almost always on big bills we’d have technical corrections.”
He said the question is which members of the House and Senate would help strike a deal “without demolishing the bill.” Lott floated as possibilities Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the incoming chair of the Ways & Means Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the incoming chair of the Finance Committee, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who will be ranking member of the Finance Committee.
When a reporter followed up to clarify that Lott would encourage Republicans to support a technical fix to Obamacare to clarify the ambiguity at issue in the Supreme Court case, he said, “Sure. Yeah. I would.”
It’s not clear what the new Republican Congress will want to do about Obamacare if the Supreme Court in King v. Burwell rules that the statute forbids subsidies on the federal exchange, which serves millions of residents in the 36 states which opted not to build their own. A ruling against the Obama administration could greatly damage the law.
Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader-elect Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said a ruling in King against Obamacare would “take it down” and pave the way for a “comprehensive revisitation” of health care reform and “major do-over of the whole thing.”
Except it is only “an ambiguity” because the R’s frothing Tea Mob wants something, ANYTHING to chew on.
If not for the rabid anti-Obama obstructionists in Congress, this would never have been an issue, but they managed to sort through the language that most sane people understand in its simplest and most pertinent meaning, and found word combinations they can extrapolate artificially to create what can only be called ambiguous by someone desperate to obstruct… ANYTHING.
Without a compliant oldstream media to nudge this semantic overreaching into the anti-Obama lexicon, this issue would never have grown the phantom legs that seem to carry it forward. And the fact the Supreme Court’s Corporate 5, with Roberts in full retreat from his earlier judicial wisdom, has chosen to interfere so dramatically is just more proof they are pawns of big business, not protectors of our individual rights and freedom.
Without those subsidies to help me get the healthcare I needed desperately, I would have become a much bigger burden on their privileged society, and now I can work again. I would wager that story has been repeated many time over and over again, due to the subsidies that were available to people like me who had been cobra’ed out of health insurance a decade ago, when so many of us fell off the charts because the rates soared beyond our ability to pay.
Oh, there’s the play: Supremes blow up Obamacare, Republican Congress demands ridiculous concessions to fix it. Obama balks and the entire commentariat shrugs simultaneously and wonders aloud why this president can’t compromise even to rescue the cornerstone of his presidential legacy.
On the other hand, hospitals and insurers will be screaming bloody murder (and I wouldn’t be surprised if old Trent isn’t on their payroll here).
It escapes me why Democrats aren’t shouting from the rooftops that Republicans are suing to implement a massive tax increase on millions of middle-class Americans. I’m certainly not the sharpest lightbulb under the basket, but even I can recognize it for what it is.
I’m not buyin’ it. This is an obvious good-cop bad-cop routine. Lott has to give plausible deniability to the possible claim that Republicans in Congress do not want to repair the law to be in accord with the obvious intention of its writers. Because that is what the Supremes will do: send it back to Congress to “fix” it.
cause it seems dems wont do things that would make a hell of a lot of common sence…like fight against the republicons and their policies that hurt the average american…they might get called mean names