Speaker of the House John Boehner, House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Republican
Whip Kevin McCarthy have consistently blocked
efforts by Reps. Steve King and Michele
Bachmann to defund the so-called “Obamacare slush fund”
via the continuing resolution or House spending bills, despite
being told by House Republican leadership staff that they could do
so under current House rules.
“There is no way we can include their [Bachmann and
King’s] amendment; it would just bog us down and undercut the
leadership goal of getting real cutting done through negotiations
with Democrats and the White House,” says a leadership aide,
sticking to talking points generated out of Cantor’s office after
Tuesday’s vote in the House to extend funding for government
through early April.
Bachmann and King have been pressing to zero out the $105
billion that funds the Obama Administration’s implementation of the
president’s health care plan.
Despite broad support among the American public for
Congress to draw back spending on Obamacare, it has done nothing to
remove the $105 billion that the previous Congress had allocated.
Under the terms of the funding allocation, about $5 billion is
budgeted for implementation purposes in FY2011, while another $100
billion has been appropriated for FY2012 through 2020.
Staff for McCarthy privately attempted to distance their
boss from Boehner and Cantor. “[McCarthy] is not opposed to finding
a way to zero out the implementation funding,” said an aide. “But
if the majority leader and Speaker don’t want it, the whip isn’t in
a position to push too hard. But let’s be clear, there is nothing
to all the hooey about how leadership is supporting funding of
Obamacare, because we aren’t bending to every whim of King and
Queen Michele.”
In fact, House leadership is. According to sources
familiar with discussions among House Republican leadership,
Boehner and Cantor were informed by GOP leadership staff that it
would have been “relatively easy” to gain the necessary votes to
change House rules to allow the Bachmann-King amendment to be
included in the continuing resolution. “It has been done in the
past without a lot of sound and fury,” says a current House member.
“You change the rules and then you include the amendment that you
want now that the rules have been changed. I don’t know why this
situation is any different.”
Instead of playing the parliamentary gambit, Boehner and
Cantor pressed for a vote on the spending and whipped more than
half of the freshman Republican class to vote with them, leaving
their Tea Party supporters back home wondering how their
representatives could so quickly break with their
constituencies.
For Boehner and Cantor’s part, they have promised
Republicans a vote on the Bachmann-King amendment as a stand-alone
bill. The only problem: such a bill has no chance of passage in the
Senate with a Democrat majority.
“This vote gives us the ability to say we voted to defund
the slush fund, where it goes from there doesn’t really matter,”
says an aide to Cantor. “We just want this off the table so we can
get to some serious budget negotiations, not political
stunts.”
