Politico's Todd S. Purdum: Obamacare Was "Sabotaged" by a "Concerted" Republican "Conspiracy"

There you go.

To the undisputed reasons for Obamacare’s rocky rollout — a balky website, muddied White House messaging and sudden sticker shock for individuals forced to buy more expensive health insurance — add a less acknowledged cause: calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step.

That may sound like a left-wing conspiracy theory —

Nah, bro. Sounds perfectly reasonable.

-- and the Obama administration itself is so busy defending the indefensible early failings of its signature program that it has barely tried to make this case. But there is a strong factual basis for such a charge.

From the moment the bill was introduced, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress announced their intention to kill it. Republican troops pressed this cause all the way to the Supreme Court — which upheld the law, but weakened a key part of it by giving states the option to reject an expansion of Medicaid. The GOP faithful then kept up their crusade past the president’s reelection, in a pattern of “massive resistance” not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Did you just say "Brown v. Board of Education"?

The opposition was strategic from the start: Derail President Barack Obama’s biggest ambition, and derail Obama himself. Party leaders enforced discipline, withholding any support for the new law —

Usually called "opposing the law," which until now was not a conspiracy.

-- which passed with only Democratic votes, thus undermining its acceptance.

Yes. Undermining acceptance is what people opposed to a law do.

Partisan divisions also meant that Democrats could not pass legislation smoothing out some rough language in the draft bill that passed the Senate.

Yes, that's because Democrats passed it on a party-line vote, ignoring the Scott Brown 41st vote to stop it.

That left the administration forced to fill far more gaps through regulation than it otherwise would have had to do, because attempts — usually routine — to re-open the bill for small changes could have led to wholesale debate in the Senate all over again.

Yes, the Administration was forced to not compromise and declare unilateral executive power to change the law.

...

Then, in the months leading up to the program’s debut, some states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law.

Okay, I'm not quoting anymore. Next time you see "Todd S. Purdum" in a byline, know that he wrote this insanely partisan conspiracy-theory-without-an-actual-conspiracy.

posted by Ace at 11:56 AM

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