Reporter’s Notebook: Government shutdown stalls as Democrats demand Obamacare subsidy extension

Government shutdowns can be pretty boring.

Until a shutdown impacts you.

There’s a missed paycheck. Flight delays. You can’t visit the Smithsonian. Questions about food and drug safety.

You get the idea.

But until you reach that tipping point, most Americans are ho-hum about government shutdowns and interpret the infighting between Democrats and Republicans as de rigueur on Capitol Hill.

So they don’t pay much mind to them.

However, Democrats engineered a scheme in advance of this fall’s government shutdown. They would transmogrify the shutdown into something Americans care about: healthcare.

Democrats know that healthcare consistently polls well with voters. Democrats have known for months that many people who receive their healthcare coverage via ‘Obamacare exchanges’ would absorb a marked price spike with their premiums early next year. Moreover, notices informing people about the impending price increase would start to hit mailboxes in mid-October.

So Democrats have pleaded with Republicans to subsidize Obamacare to defray looming price increases. Obamacare subsidies and the government shutdown aren’t directly connected. But Democrats believed they could link the two. And then, after people snored off to sleep about the government shutdown on Oct. 1, they were rudely awakened by a notice in the mail that their healthcare premiums were about to jump.

Say what you will about the tactics, but it was a shrewd strategy by Democrats to seize on an issue important to their base. Moreover, it gave the party the opportunity to show voters that it’s ‘fighting’ against President Donald Trump. That’s something which didn’t happen in the March funding round. In fact, the Democrats’ lack of fighting is what set a match to an internecine fight among Democrats about how to combat the president. The public and the government are absorbing the flames of that internal conflagration now, but Democrats may have found a way to salve those wounds.

‘Fighting for healthcare is our defining issue,’ said House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., in an exclusive sit-down interview with Fox News. ‘Shutdowns are terrible and there will be families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have.’

That’s why healthcare is the linchpin to the shutdown.

But enter Republicans. They believe Democrats own the healthcare crisis. They passed Obamacare in the first place. It was a Democratic Congress under President Joe Biden that boosted the subsidy to defray the cost of Obamacare in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the touchstone of the Democrats’ legislative agenda.

‘It is the Democrats who created that subsidy who put the expiration date on it. They did it all on their own,’ said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.

Some Republicans have even reverted to their 2010 mantra to ‘repeal and replace’ Obamacare.

That said, Johnson tried to beat back those calls from conservatives.

‘There’s no way to repeal and replace it because it’s too deeply ingrained right now. We have to improve it,’ said Johnson.

Such a declaration would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Here we have a Republican Speaker of the House arguing that Congress must sustain — even assist — Obamacare.

‘Obamacare has been a failure,’ said Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., on Fox News. ‘We’ve been enduring this now for almost 15 years.’

Stutzman benefited from the GOP’s plan to ditch Obamacare in 2010. It was an historic, 63-seat midterm election pickup for Republicans. Voters sent Stutzman to Washington for the first time in that midterm.

The Indiana Republican added that he’s ‘not sure that subsidies are the answer in the long run.’

‘Every couple of years they need more and more subsidies to be able to prop [Obamacare] up because it’s not affordable,’ said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., on Fox Business Network.

Democrats are demanding Obamacare subsidies before they agree to a Republican plan to fund the government.

‘It is an inflection point in this budget process where we have tried to get the Republicans to meet with us and prioritize the American people,’ said Clark.

But Democrats believe the need to boost Obamacare reveals flaws in the law.

‘Isn’t that an indictment that there’s a problem with [Obamacare]?’ I asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. ‘The fact that it needs to be propped up in some form?’

‘No,’ replied Jeffries. ‘The overwhelming majority of the American people, including in the Republican-run states, support an extension of the [Obamacare] tax credits.’

Some Republicans reject extending the subsidies.

‘I’m not going to vote to extend these subsidies.They’re through the roof expensive,’ said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

But other conservatives insist that Obamacare needs rescuing.

‘If you’re on [Obamacare] your premium is going to literally double. If you have your own private health insurance policy, your premium is going to go up and people already can’t afford their premiums,’ said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. ‘People back at home are going, ‘Wait a minute, my premium is going to skyrocket.’’

Greene is one of the most outspoken members of her party when it comes to concerns about the premium increases. In fact, she believes that Republicans allowed ‘Democrats to hold the moral high ground on it, because they’re talking about it.’

Greene and Johnson spoke about her concerns several days ago.

But Obamacare vexed the GOP for years.

Former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and others led an effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. House Republicans voted dozens of times to wipe out Obamacare in 2011 and 2012. They couldn’t push such a package through the Senate, but it made for a powerful GOP talking point. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., got a little closer. Republicans had the Senate in 2016. So the House and Senate both voted for the first time to repeal and replace Obamacare, but President Barack Obama vetoed it.

Republicans finally had the trifecta of the House, Senate and White House in 2017 after Trump won the election. The House initially stumbled, having to yank the repeal and replace package off the floor in the spring of 2017. But the House regrouped and finally engineered a strategy that passed. But the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., single-handedly tanked the bill when he famously voted against the package in a dramatic roll call vote in the summer of 2017.

‘I still have PTSD from the experience,’ said Johnson of the GOP efforts.

Trump even offered a familiar, if well-traveled promise, during last year’s campaign.

‘I have concepts of a plan,’ the president said at the ABC presidential debate last fall. ‘You’ll be hearing about it in the not too distant future.’

So while a resolution to the government shutdown remains elusive, so do the positions about one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in the past 50 years.

Republicans have tried to flip the script on the Democrats — now highlighting the problems with Obamacare. The GOP hopes that rekindles a familiar antipathy the right has for Obamacare and helps them during the shutdown.

‘Obamacare is a failed product in the first place. And they used that as an excuse in order to add additional federal dollars,’ said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.

The sides just don’t see eye-to-eye.

‘When [Obamacare] was passed, healthcare was a lot less costly than it is now, and insurance rates were a lot lower. So these healthcare tax credits are necessary for healthcare inflation to make it affordable for people,’ said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Obamacare and the shutdown are now inextricably linked. And if dealing with that wasn’t complicated enough, the infusion of Obamacare into the debate makes the legislative morass seemingly intractable.