How Republicans Made Congress Stupid

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-republicans-made-congress-stupid


NEW ORLEANS, LA - JUNE 16: Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich addresses the Republican Leadership Conference on June 16, 2011 at the Hilton Riverside New Orleans in New Orleans, LA.
Photo Credit: Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

Last September, as they scrambled to decide on one final ultimatum before shutting down the federal government, Republican House leaders came up with what seemed like an odd demand: to strip their own staff of health care benefits.

At the time, staffers reacted to the news with a mixture of despair and disbelief. “It was like getting sucker-punched by your boss,” one aide told me. “Everyone was thinking, What’s the point? How is screwing us going to help you?”

The dubious logic behind the House Republicans’ demand can be traced back to a contested provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the gutting of which was the price the Republicans were demanding for agreeing to fund the government. The provision requires employees of the U.S. Congress, including members and their staffs, to buy insurance on the new health care exchanges, while still allowing them to receive subsidies from their employer. Over the course of more than a year, ideologues at several conservative think tanks, especially the Tea Party-friendly Heritage Foundation, which was pushing for the shutdown, managed to put an imaginative spin on the provision, convincing the conservative world that members and their staff were getting a sneaky, backroom deal, a “special exemption from Obamacare.”

In fact, had the Republicans’ desired language passed, congressional personnel would have become the only employees in America whose employer (in their case, the federal government) was explicitly forbidden from contributing to their health care—a blow that, in all likelihood, would have caused most of the best and brightest staffers, and perhaps some lawmakers, to simply hightail it for the door. Some quite conservative members even said as much. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, in a candid moment later, called the move “political theater” that would do nothing more than catalyze a rapid “brain drain” in Congress.