Liberal journalists selling out their reputations by defending the disastrous Obamacare rollout have been wailing that the real reason for Healthcare.gov’s failure is Republican sabotage. But there’s a huge difference between the tactic Republicans have actually been using — withdrawal of support — and the active interference of which Democrats accuse them.
Politico’s Todd Purdhum labeled the GOP’s restrained disapprobation “calculated sabotage.” He wrote that Republicans “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.” (Someone needs to remind Purdhum that that was his party leading the segregationist charge.)
Steve Benen approvingly cited an administration official saying, “You’re basically trying to build a complicated building in a war zone, because the Republicans are lobbing bombs at us.” Lobbing bombs? More like failing to provide gold-plated reinforcements rushed in by barefoot runners.
Washington Post reporters Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin sympathetically repeated the White House’s sobbing claim that it couldn’t bless states with its own calligraphic diagrams showing how to run a perfect state exchange, because big bad Republicans would “brandish” their charts to the media as the bureaucratic Rube Goldberg schemes they are.
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones argued that most of the administration’s missteps in its Obamacare implementation resulted not from managerial incompetence or political calculations, but from the Sun-Tzu-derived stratagem that “Sabotage Works.”
In fact, Republicans and Tea Partiers have been practically Gandhi-like in their non-aggressive measures to overturn the law.
Here are the actual tactics Republicans have used: not voting for Obamacare, not allocating money for the federal exchange, declining Medicaid funds, refusing to set up 51 state exchanges, not approving more money to fix the broken website, not sympathizing with beleaguered Health and Human Services officials in the hot seat, refusing to waste time personally navigating individual voters through Healthcare.gov, and refusing to accept Obamacare as “settled law.”
That’s a lot of focused, frenzied inaction, but notice what it all has in common: not doing things.
In the same way that conservatives generally support the “negative liberties” protected by the Constitution — the rights not to be physically attacked or slandered, not to have your property or firearms confiscated, not to have your income stolen and redistributed — they have similarly pursued “negative tactics” in opposing Obamacare: refusing to condone, fund, or support it.
Meanwhile, Democrats who favor “positive rights” involving redistribution of wealth, promotion of “social justice,” and judicial activism naturally confuse Republican failure to help implement Obamacare with active efforts to hamstring it. Democrats have spent so long pursuing an activist government that tramples people’s rights, they can’t distinguish legitimate political dissent from ornery sabotage. In their view, “all-out war” equals “not lavishing trillions of dollars on something your constituents despise but the Democrat political class adores.”
Ironically, the party regularly labeled “war-mongerers” is engaging in the most passive, most serene opposition campaign to Obamacare possible, merely by embodying the mantra, “This too shall pass.”
