Grover Norquist Almost Comes Up With a Clever Plan to Fight Obamacare


Dave Weigel alerts me today to a “smarter” version of the conservative obsession with repealing Obamacare. It comes from Grover Norquist and a supporting cast of about a dozen right-wing luminaries. Here it is:

  1. Mandates. The president has already delayed the mandate for the biggest corporations unilaterally….Congress should lift the legal cloud on that delay and extend the same relief to individuals and small businesses by delaying the individual mandate.
  2. Subsidies. Without a complete, workable verification system to protect taxpayers it would be reckless to allow tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to flow in subsidies….The money should not flow when the law’s verification provisions are not ready to be enforced.
  3. Taxes. The American people should not be forced to pay higher taxes for a system that isn’t ready.

Um, what? How is this smarter? Instead of simply repealing Obamacare, this plan proposes repeal of the individual mandate, the subsidies, and the taxes that pay for it. But that’s practically the whole bill. Aside from the Medicaid expansion, the only thing left is the guarantee of private coverage for people with preexisting conditions.

(And why is that one provision left alone? Hard to say. The charitable explanation is that it’s very popular, so Norquist doesn’t want to oppose it. The less charitable explanation is that keeping it around without the subsidies or the mandate would be a disaster for insurance companies, which would turn them into enemies of Obamacare. Take your pick.)

The problem is that politically, this is as much a nonstarter as full repeal. So it’s only smart if it makes a dent with the public. But I don’t see how. It’s too complicated for most people to understand or care about.

Actually, I think Norquist came close to a winner with this proposal, but then whiffed. What he should have proposed is a flat one-year delay for the whole bill. That’s easy to understand and easy to defend, and it’s the perfect complement for all the horror stories conservatives are ginning up about problems with implementation. It’s still a nonstarter politically, but at least it would force Democrats to defend the law more vigorously than they are right now, and maybe even to overreach and make promises they can’t keep. Unfortunately for Norquist, I suppose the true believers never would have gotten behind it. It would have seemed like too much of a sellout. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate