Now's time to repair debt ceiling for future -- Feb. 12, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER  

“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining,” President Kennedy said in his 1962 State of the Union Address.

The sun is shining, and now’s the time to fix the debt ceiling for the future.  

Led by Speaker John Boehner, the House stepped back from the brink Tuesday and approved extending the federal government’s borrowing authority until March 15, 2015, no strings attached. The Senate followed Wednesday.  

Congress does its job -- hip, hip, hurray!

It’s a sign of our low expectations of Washington that the absence of a last-minute game of chicken was considered a great achievement.  

The country will not suffer a self-inflicted fiscal black eye. Yes! The government will honor its debts, federal parks will stay open and our economy won’t go into a tailspin. We’re No. 1!

There will be peace in the valley again. Ha. Let’s not go overboard. Forget peace in the valley or on the Hill.   

Boehner tried for two weeks to squeeze concessions from the White House in return for Republican votes to lift the debt ceiling. A change in the Affordable Care Act? No.  Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline? No. Restoration of cost-of-living increases to military pensions? No. 

President Barack Obama wouldn’t budge from a “clean” bill.

Boehner told his House Republican colleagues at a private breakfast Tuesday that the measure would include no special conditions. The goal was practical: Congress would do its job and avoid an election-year repeat of last fall’s high drama showdown and shutdown.

Last October, Republicans hoping to kill the health law forced a 16-day federal government shutdown that did nothing to dislodge Obamacare but took a $24 billion bite out of the economy, as estimated by Standard & Poor. Americans mostly blamed Republicans, although Democrats’ approval ratings slid as well.  

“We’re not going to make ourselves the story,” Boehner said at the breakfast, The Washington Post reported. The room was hushed as he returned to his seat.

“I’m getting this monkey off your back, and you’re not going to even clap?” the Ohio Republican asked in mock scorn. Such is party unity among the GOP.

Boehner has long had problems bringing his conference together at all, much less mustering the 218 votes that constitute a House majority.

“When you don’t have 218 votes, you have nothing,” he told reporters.

The debt limit measure passed 221 to 201 in the House, with 199 Republicans voting no. Boehner and 27 of his fellow Republicans voted for it. Most of the GOP yes votes came from House leaders, such as Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, or members who are retiring, such as Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia. 

The White House didn’t gloat, but press secretary Jay Carney did suggest that Congress now get behind Obama’s push to hike the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and renew long-term jobless benefits. As if.

Congress and the White House should use the breathing room of the next year to work together to make the debt ceiling a non- issue, as it once was. Neither party should lose stature because it acts responsibly. Paying our bills should be a given, not a bargaining chip.

Some in Congress have introduced fixes to the recurring debit limit debacle. Rep. Mike Honda, a California Democrat, and Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Chuck Schumer of New York and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii have bills that would shift the role of Congress. Instead of approving increases in the debt ceiling, Congress would have to disapprove them.

A similar proposal by Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, became part of last fall’s deal that raised the debt ceiling until Feb. 7. Democrats want to make permanent the McConnell fix.

A few centrist Republicans say they’re interested in the idea, but it’s unlikely to gain traction this year as Democrats and Republicans score political points before the midterm elections.

Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, “When this is over, we will focus on our agenda and – if we win six seats in the Senate – what we will do different if we control all of Congress.”

Boehner was wrong about one thing.  Republicans did become the story. Washington news has become a running tally of winners and losers.    

“GOP’s debt ceiling surrender,” read headlines in Politico and other news outlets.

This time, though, the Republicans’ political retreat was a victory for the country. Boehner deserves a hand. 

And as the sun shines, Democrats and Republicans should join in fixing the debt ceiling for the future.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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It's time for two 'dirty' words: compromise and negotiate -- Oct. 3, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A few hours before the federal government pointlessly shut down for lack of a budget, President Barack Obama called House Speaker John Boehner.

   

“I’m not going to negotiate,” the president said Monday night, according to Boehner’s account of the conversation. On the House floor, Boehner even regaled his pals with a poor imitation of the president’s “I’m not going to negotiate.”

As bad as the shutdown is, the real crisis could come when the United States reaches its limit for borrowing money Oct. 17 and faces a default on some of its debts.  Republicans are insisting on spending cuts or entitlement reform equal to the amount of the increase in borrowing authority. The White House feared that if it started negotiating now over the budget, it would be weakened in the coming fight over the debt ceiling.

For his part, Boehner pledged to Republicans last January that he would not negotiate one-on-one with Obama ever again. Boehner felt heat from tea party members, who see compromise as caving, pure and simple.  Plus, he felt the White House mistreated him after he attempted to reach a grand bargain on deficit reduction in 2011 and 2012.

So here we are. The country’s most powerful Democrat and Republican refused on principle to negotiate, the federal government ground to a halt for the first time in 17 years, and the worst is yet to come.

Whether you believe Obama or Boehner is right, something is very wrong when both parties dig in their heels and lead the country into a costly, stressful, avoidable crisis. We’re better than that. It’s good that the president finally invited congressional leaders to the White House to talk, but it should have happened sooner.    

Boehner has acquiesced when conservative House Republicans’ claimed compromise by passing bills that everybody knew were dead on arrival in the Democratic Senate. That’s brinksmanship, not compromise.

Obama likes to say that “one faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government” can’t shut the government down. Except that it has. Now what?  

A recent poll indicated that most people prefer a candidate who “stands up for what he or she believes” over one who “compromises to get things done.” But that’s a false, either-or choice. We should have both: principled leaders compromise for the greater good.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is running a new re-election campaign ad around the novel notion that compromise isn’t a bad thing.

“See, I think as long as you stick to your principles, compromise isn’t a dirty word,” Republican Christie says in the ad. He insists that his every accomplishment as governor has been the result of bipartisanship.

New Jersey has a strong Democratic base, which requires bipartisanship. In the U.S. House, though, because of the way districts are drawn, lawmakers need to appeal only to like-minded constituents. There’s little, if any, upside to cooperation.  

With neither side inclined to budge, we’re stuck. But what would happen if Obama and Boehner called in a true negotiator to break the impasse?

They could agree to listen to someone like Kenneth Feinberg, who has been the go-to mediator of compensation for victims of almost every major disaster in recent American history. Feinberg negotiated settlements for the victims of 9/11, the Virginia Tech shooting, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the shooting victims in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn.  He most recently has been negotiating payments for victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

He got his start in this difficult work in 1984 in a case involving Vietnam veterans who suffered exposure to Agent Orange.

  

For anyone who’s sick of business as usual in Washington -- and who isn’t? – it’s intriguing to consider what could happen if someone who cares about fairness, not political gain, was in charge.

As the shutdown began on Tuesday, World War II veterans came to visit their memorial in Washington only to find the memorial closed. Around the country, everyone -- Democrats and Republicans alike --  cheered upon hearing that the old soldiers simply walked or rolled their wheelchairs around the barriers.

What we need now is someone who will remove the barriers between Congress and the president, and get us rolling on the path to a functional government. Calling Ken Feinberg.

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Once more, it's `Message: I care'

 By MARSHA MERCER

In 1992, when a beleaguered President George H.W. Bush blurted out “Message: I care” at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, he accomplished the exact opposite of what he intended. 

Voters believed that Bush was even more out of touch with the economic problems of everyday people than they’d thought.

We’re about to see whether President Barack Obama’s appeal for “a better bargain for the middle class” works better than the elder Bush’s awkward “I care.”

Washington insider Bush lost his re-election bid against outsider Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton in large part because the Arkansas governor could credibly argue that he’d change Washington.  

In 2008, Obama used his fresh face as a Washington neophyte to his advantage. Today, though, Obama is undeniably an insider, having been elected president twice. And yet he’s fighting for his agenda and his place in history by distancing himself from the capital.   

“Too often Washington has made things worse,” Obama said Wednesday at Knox College in Illinois. He repeated the thought in later speeches.

Obama is blaming Republicans for thwarting his vision, and, yes, he has faced a wall of partisan opposition since Day One.  But the fact is, Obama can’t even count on his Democratic friends in the Senate for support. 

Plus, he is the chief executive, and as the sign in Truman’s Oval Office read, “The buck stops here.”  

When Obama dismisses troubling revelations in his Executive Branch – bias at the IRS, cover-ups in the State Department and widespread snooping at the National Security Agency – as “phony scandals,” he fails to instill confidence that he will do whatever it takes to clean up the mess.     

Reactions to Obama’s new campaign to prove he cares about the middle class were predictably political.

“It’s a hollow shell; it’s an Easter egg with no candy in it,” opined House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, as if House Republicans’ voting about 40 times to repeal the health care law known as Obamacare was a solid-chocolate bunny.

Obama is largely recycling his proposals that have stalled in gridlocked Washington. He apparently thinks he can mobilize his grassroots base over the next eight weeks to pressure the GOP to come his way.  But Obama is not in a position of strength.  

His job approval rating is down to 45 percent in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll.  The only bright spot for Obama is that people hold Congress in even lower regard than they do him. 

Only 12 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, and just 32 percent say their own member of Congress deserves to keep the job. More than half say it’s “time to give a new person a chance,” the poll found. That’s the weakest support for Congress in nearly 20 years.

You’d think these numbers would chasten lawmakers, but not Congress. Members are rewarding their poor performance with a five-week vacation. Obama also has a vacation planned -- Aug. 10 to 18 in tony Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. 

In September, Republicans threaten to play high-stakes roulette with a government shutdown. Dozens of conservative Republicans are demanding that money to implement and enforce the health law be struck – or they’ll refuse to keep the government open.  

That won’t help Americans sour mood.  Only 29 percent think the country is on the right track – a 19-month low.

Obama’s place in history depends on his keeping his signature health care law alive now and in the future. That means keeping a Democratic majority in the Senate after 2014. Some analysts say it’s possible that the Senate’s fragile Democratic majority could crumble in the next election. In the House, incumbents tend to have a lock on re-election, so the GOP is likely to maintain its control.

  

So, Obama hit the road for one last campaign.  Critics complain that he shouldn’t be in campaign mode, but had he stayed in town, they’d criticize him for failing to lead. It’s hard for a Washington insider to win -- even when he says he cares.

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Why House GOP is wrong on Obamacare -- March 21, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Mitt Romney promised during his presidential campaign to repeal the health law on his first day in office. 

Big mistake, he says now.  

“I think Obamacare attractiveness…was something we underestimated, particularly among lower incomes,” Romney said in an interview March 3 on “Fox News Sunday,” adding, “Obamacare was very attractive, particularly to those without health insurance.”

Leaving aside the reference to people as “lower incomes,” this is like Romney’s saying he underestimated how attractive food is to someone who’s starving.

A hungry person chooses a meal over a sermon on the virtues of eating less. Who knew?

And yet it didn’t dawn on Romney until too late that when 49 million people are uninsured, that’s a lot of votes for someone else who’s trying to make their lives better. President Barack Obama got 65 million votes last November.

If the enlightened Romney was trying to warn Republicans to back off their war on Obamacare, it didn’t work. House Republicans are in denial about the Affordable Care Act – even though the Supreme Court upheld it, Obama got four more years and the Senate stayed in Democratic hands.

House Republicans keep fighting. They may be encouraged by the tepid approval that Americans have in polls for the Affordable Care Act.

When President Obama signed the health law March 23, 2010, in a festive White House ceremony, 46 percent of people approved of the law and 40 percent disapproved, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

An optimistic Obama declared, “The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see.”

In fact, the signing set in motion non-stop barrage of opposition. 

House Speaker John Boehner called it a “somber” day for the American people, and House Republicans haven’t stopped bashing since.

Although Obama won the 2012 election, Republicans think they’re winning the marketing war. So, although they look foolish when they insist on voting year after year to repeal a law that has been upheld, they continue to tarnish the law. Yes, many of them support some of the law’s provisions.

Support of the health law nationally has dropped to 37 percent. Forty percent view the law unfavorably and the rest declined to answer, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported Wednesday.

The law was designed so that popular provisions went into effect first. It allows young people under 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance, abolishes lifetime caps on benefits, prohibits insurers from refusing to cover children with pre-existing conditions, provides free preventive services and begins closing the donut hole for seniors’ prescription drugs.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says 3 million young people now have health insurance through their parents, 100,000 very sick people are receiving insurance through high-risk pools, and Medicare costs are actually dropping.

This is good news, but… Most people – 62 percent – haven’t seen any effects of the law, and only 17 percent say they’ve seen benefits like lower costs or greater access to care, according to Kaiser. A larger share, 22 percent, say they or their family have been negatively affected by higher costs or cuts in benefits.

And that’s a problem for Obama. With carrots first, people were supposed to accept sticks later. In January, mandates kick in requiring that individuals have health insurance and businesses with 50 full-time employees offer insurance -- or pay penalties.

Republicans now are trying to kill funding, just as the government is creating insurance marketplaces or exchanges where individuals and small businesses will shop for insurance.

With many details yet to be worked out, small-business owners worry. They want to help their employees, comply with the law and stay in business. Those goals should be compatible. 

Romney realized belatedly that the uninsured matter. It’s time Obama recognizes that small businesses matter. Senate Democrats need to make sure that the administration has the money to make the law a success.  

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Hey, Congress: First, do no harm -- Feb. 21, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A Wal-Mart executive complained that February sales were “a total disaster.”

His email leaked and naturally made news. We rarely sniff panic from the world’s largest retailer.

The fact that Wal-Mart shoppers were staying home, though, was hardly surprising.

On Jan. 1, Congress and the White House raised the payroll tax 2 percentage points -- from 4.2 percent to 6.2 percent – for every working American. A family earning $50,000 will have a thousand dollars less to spend this year.

 

A thousand dollars may sound like zip when some Americans can afford to spend $100,000 on a closet -- not on the clothes in the closet, mind you, but on the spacious and fancy dressing room where they armor-up to meet the day.

    

“These days the cost of a closet can rival or surpass that of the kitchen,” the Wall Street Journal cheerfully advised.

     

Talk about parallel universes. For most Americans, confidence in the economy has slipped. We’re  worried about higher gas prices. Gas rose 45 cents on average in 31 days, the fastest climb since 2005.

We still have 12.3 million people officially unemployed, and 46.2 million of us live in poverty. The poverty rate for children under 18 is about 22 percent.

But other Americans, a fortunate few, have disposable income such that they can drop $100,000 to $250,000 on a closet.

While Wal-Mart sales are down this month, high-end retailers have been on a roll, reporting huge gains in sales. 

  

And we’re worried about higher taxes on the very rich? Really?

The country’s richest citizens, the Forbes 400, are worth an astonishing $1.7 trillion, the most ever.  Income inequality has been growing by leaps and bounds.

In the past, the very mention of income inequality provoked Republican wrath and charges of class warfare. Fortunately, Warren Buffett has changed that.   

“In recent years, my gang has been leaving the middle class in the dust,” the sage of Omaha wrote in a New York Times op-ed last November.

President Barack Obama declared in his inaugural address last month that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” He has proposed a hike in the minimum wage, which Republicans are expected to kill.

It’s too bad that “first, do no harm,” the pillar of medical ethics, doesn’t apply to our elected officials in Washington.

While Congress enjoyed an extended Presidents Day vacation, political leaders played a game of chicken with the looming sequestration spending cuts. Many economists warn that if those across-the-board cuts take effect March 1, they will usher in another recession.

When the president arrayed blue-uniformed emergency medical workers behind him on Tuesday to warn of impending job losses should Republicans fail to negotiate on a deal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed it as a campaign stunt. 

House Speaker John Boehner took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal  Wednesday to warn that the sequester threatens national security and thousands of jobs – and to lay blame at the president’s feet. Both Boehner and McConnell gigged Obama for wasteful federal spending.

      

 “No one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cell phones and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines,” Boehner wrote.

I looked into Boehner’s claims. The Energy Department did pay 13 workers at a company in Michigan who played video games and otherwise goofed off when they should have been working. I’m shocked, shocked that this could happen in an American workplace. 

  

The government started providing discounted phone service to poor people in 1985. Cell phones were added under President George W. Bush. As for the cigarette-smoking machine, Veterans Affairs recently approved such a contract for research into the health effects of smoking in lab mice. 

Nobody likes government waste, but taken together all three projects represent such a miniscule amount that they hardly should be allowed to hold the entire nation hostage. 

  

Washington needs to find a way to keep the economy afloat. If a few can build $100,000 closets, most should be able to shop at Wal-Mart.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Pushing term limits for Congress off the cliff -- Jan. 3, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Did you hear the one about sleep-deprived octogenarians in the Senate?

There’s no punch line. A Republican House member told his colleagues it would be ridiculous to follow the old fogies in voting for the fiscal cliff agreement. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the joke was on him.

One lesson we can learn from the fiscal cliff drama: Experience matters.

We’ve debated for years whether Washington insiders are a boon or a bane in public life. Too often it seems that the less a congressional candidate knows, or wants to know, about how Washington works, the more voters like him or her. 

The motto of the U.S. Term Limits group, “citizen legislators, not career politicians,” is appealing -- until there’s a crisis that requires political skill.

Were it not for two savvy old political pros, the country would have plunged over the fiscal cliff permanently and landed in the ravine of recession. The New Year’s Day deal to avoid tax hikes and deep automatic cuts in spending was far from perfect, but it was good news for the country.  It was bad news for advocates of congressional term limits and ageists who prefer stereotypes to real life examples.

Two 70-year-olds who had served together in the Senate for about a quarter of a century rose to the occasion. Vice President Joe Biden, formerly the Democratic senator from Delaware, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky, reached the compromise that had eluded the president and house speaker.

President Barack Obama isn’t a natural negotiator. Goading when he should have guided, Obama infuriated Republicans every time he opened his mouth. Critics complained that Obama should have been more like Lyndon Johnson, but Obama lacks LBJ’s long years in the House and Senate. Nor does he have Bill Clinton’s or George W. Bush’s gubernatorial experience, coping with legislators from the other party.

As for Speaker John Boehner, he gave up trying to herd the tea-chugging cats in his own party. Boehner, a lad of 63 who came to the House in 1991, grew so frustrated after needling from Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, who’s a decade older with four more Senate years, that Boehner used locker room language to Reid -- in the White House.

The approval rating for Congress hovers below 20 percent, so it’s no big surprise that three out of four Americans tell pollsters they favor limiting how long someone can stay in Congress. But after Arkansas tried to do just that, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that states may not restrict the number of congressional terms. To limit terms requires a constitutional amendment. The Florida legislature last year passed a resolution urging Congress to adopt a term-limits amendment.

The twin public appetites for term limits and the sweet bird of youth can result in odd moments.

While campaigning for his eighth term in Congress, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was asked if he supported congressional term limits of two terms for the Senate and three for the House. Yes, indeed, he said; he’s a big fan. Really?

  

In November, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, 72, was asked by NBC News’ Luke Russert, 27, whether she and her team were keeping a younger generation of Democrats from taking the House reins. Her deputies, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, are 73 and 72.

“Some of your colleagues privately say that your decision to stay on prohibits the party from having a younger leadership and hurts the party in the long run,” Russert said, and asked for her response. She allowed that his question was “quite offensive” but he probably didn’t realize it.

Pelosi, a formidable fundraiser for Democratic candidates, proved her leadership skills during the fiscal cliff-hanger. She held her Democratic caucus together in support of the agreement, allowing many Republicans to make a show of voting no, pretending they opposed the agreement.

Such theatrics belie the serious challenges that face our country. Thank heavens we still have experienced hands in Congress. Let’s hope they use their political expertise to do right for the country. This is no time for amateurs or snide comments. 

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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The definition of insanity -- Nov. 15, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Psychologists reject the popular definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Insanity is just a legal term, they say.

Fine, but they should hang around the nation’s capital. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see we’re living in a nutty time.

We just endured a $6 billion election – the costliest in American history – that failed to reset Washington. For the last two years, as gridlock reigned, people kept saying “after the election, after the election...”

Finally the election came and went and we still have the same key players in the White House and Congress. We hear talk of compromise, but at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue the players seem to be digging in their heels, saying many of the same things about the same looming problems as they did before voters went to the polls.

One big difference now: Time is running out to fix a fiscal crisis that could plunge the country back into recession and bring misery to millions. Unless President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans agree soon on a deficit reduction plan, a package of $500 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will kick in automatically in early January.

Obama is sticking to his campaign pledge to raise the income tax rates on the top 2 percent of individuals and top 3 percent of businesses. That’s what the election was about, he says, and he won. He’s right.

Election Day exit polls found that 47 percent of voters approved of raising taxes on people with incomes above $250,000, as Obama proposes, the Associated Press reported. Only 35 percent wanted no tax increases for anyone and 13 percent favored higher taxes for all.

But Obama can’t go it alone. He must enlist balky House Republicans. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, says Republicans flatly refuse to raise tax rates. They favor closing tax loopholes and limiting deductions, which Democrats won’t raise enough revenue.

There was a glimmer of rationality after Obama’s first post-election news conference. The president seemed open to a smaller increase in tax rates on high incomes than he had called for previously. Boehner seemed to suggest the possibility of a deal, but other Republicans were dismissive. We’ve been down this road before, when Obama and Boehner failed to agree on a “grand bargain” last year. 

Speaking of insanity, almost every Republican member of Congress has signed the no-new-taxes pledge championed by Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform.

“The problem is too much spending,” Norquist declared on CBS the other day. “The problem is not that the peasants aren’t sending enough money to Washington.

But it’s not the peasants who would send in more money; it’s the princes.

Anyone who would like to see Washington work for a change hopes that Norquist’s influence is waning. But Americans for Tax Reform just poured nearly $16 million into the general election campaign, according to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation.  

The Taxpayer Protection Pledge obliges signers to oppose any effort to increase marginal tax rates or to reduce tax deductions and credits, unless matched dollar-for-dollar by further reducing tax rates.  

I’d like to say that Americans trust Obama and Congress to do their jobs and steer the country away from the fiscal cliff. Alas, no.

About half of us expect that the two sides will not reach agreement, and only 38 percent think they will, a post-election survey by Pew Research-Washington Post found.

The poll shows how little faith people have that Washington can function. Still, failing to reach a deal could prove risky to Republicans’ political health. Asked who would be to blame if no deal is reached, 53 percent said congressional Republicans and only 29 percent said Obama.  

Congress and the president need to do their jobs. Anything less is insanity.

©2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Scariest words in politics: If the court... -- May 17, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For a politician, nothing is worse than yanking away someone’s benefits in an election year.

It’s always easier to give than to take away, even if the budget is strained or the goodies are part of a health care reform law many Americans love to hate. It’s fine to hate a law as long as it’s in place, however tenuously.

With the Supreme Court expected to rule on the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, by the end of June, the scariest word in politics is If.

If the court overturns the law, what then?

The court has many options, and the consequences are uncertain. It could blow up the entire law, although most analysts think not. It could scrap the “individual mandate,” which requires almost all Americans to have medical insurance by 2014 or pay a financial penalty, and leave the rest of the law intact. It could strike the mandate and other provisions as well. It could let the law stand, as is.

Americans by substantial margins say they favor repeal, mostly because of the hated mandate. No matter that only 7 percent of Americans actually would be required to buy insurance and 93 percent would be covered through employer-sponsored plans and other exemptions, according to a study the Urban Institute released in March. The idea that Congress can compel the purchase goes against some grains.

At the same time, people love allowing children under 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance plans, closing the “donut hole” that requires some seniors on Medicare to pay more for their medications, and ensuring that people with pre-existing medical conditions get coverage.

The White House’s official position is that the court will uphold the law, so it’s making no contingency plans. Congressional Republicans have managed so far to play to both sides.

The Republican majority in the House has voted 29 times to repeal the law, knowing that the votes are all theater because the Senate would never go along. The Republicans insist they intend to “replace” the law but never explain which provisions they’ll keep beyond the most popular, including children under 26.

How the court’s ruling may affect health care is anybody’s guess, but the politics are clear. Come November, no one running for office wants to explain to the parents of a jobless college grad that their son is going to lose his health insurance.

No politician wants to tell Grandma she has to dig a little deeper for her meds or that her grandchild with a pre-existing condition may lose coverage because insurance companies can again deny coverage.

No one wants to tell some 32 million people near the poverty line who were in line for coverage under Medicaid that they won’t be covered after all.

The court could leave all this up to Congress to sort out. And that would put House Speaker John Boehner in a ticklish spot, trying to win House seats while appeasing the Tea Party set.

News reports say Boehner is quietly making plans for the Republicans’ next step, post-Supreme Court. He told the House Republican Conference behind closed doors Wednesday, “When the court rules, we’ll be ready,” Politico reported, relying on tidbits gleaned from those in attendance.

“If all or part of the law is struck down, we are not going to repeat the Democrats’ mistakes,” Boehner told his party, according to Politico. “We have better ideas on health care – lots of them. We have solutions, of course, for patients with pre-existing conditions and other challenges.”

Really? Let us see the solutions.

Ah, but that was in private. A day later, for public consumption on his House speaker blog, Boehner declared, “Anything Short of Full ObamaCare Repeal is Unacceptable.”

Once the court rules, Boehner said, the House will “work on step-by-step, common-sense legislation that will help lower health care costs for families and small businesses, and protect American jobs.”

It was a familiar refrain. He didn’t say what any of those steps might be.

It’s spring, and politicians tremble for what may come this summer. If the court overturns…

© 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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