It will be two lines:
[Incumbent Democrat] Voted for ObamaCare in 2010.
Vote Him Out in November.
Billboards can run it. TV ads can announce it. Postcards can deliver it.
This is a negative campaign ad. Therefore, it does not fall under the normal rules of the Federal Election Committee. People can donate all the money they want to a negative campaign ad. The Supreme Court decided this in 2010.
There is an ancient rule in politics that you never mention your opponent's name during a campaign. The fear is that name identification works, and some percentage of the voters will get things confused. They will get the name of the opponent in their heads, and they will vote for him on election day.
This rule is not adhered to by negative campaign advertising. This is a tremendous advantage today. Anyway, it will be a tremendous advantage in the fall of 2014. Negative campaign ads directed against incumbents are detrimental. They create doubts about the judgment of a particular politician. If the campaign is tied to a specific piece of hated legislation, the incumbent gets tarred and feathered in a way that he cannot effectively respond to. You have to have an issue that is truly hated, and it is widely despised. The hatred has to be deep, and the hostility has to be broad. Very rarely can you find a campaign issue that possesses these two features. But this is not going to be true of ObamaCare.
ObamaCare has the unique and almost historically unprecedented advantage for the Republicans, namely, that not a single Republican voted for the law. There was 100% political agreement within the Republican Party. So, a negative campaign ad against a particular Democratic politician will have zero negative consequences for any Republican in Congress. Therefore, no Republican is going to be strongly opposed to running these ads. Such an ad will be ideal for displacing Democrats, especially Democrats in the Senate.
Democrats in the House are protected by gerrymandering. This guarantees minority representation, but it almost certainly guarantees the party to a defeat in 2014, assuming that the hostility to ObamaCare is both deep and wide.
In the Senate, there is no gerrymandering. It is a straight vote. It is winner take all. In the Senate, a Democrat cannot hide from ObamaCare. He probably voted for it, and he is now going to be held responsible for this.
Nancy Pelosi made herself famous for her statement that nobody would be allowed to read the bill until after it was passed. It already has become a legendary statement. It will remain a legendary statement. The problem is, the bill was written in such a way that only the states were granted federal subsidies for setting up insurance programs in state-run exchanges. The subsidies were not granted to policies sold on the federal government's exchange. Nobody seemed to notice this. But a group of plaintiffs have noticed it, and they have brought a lawsuit against the federal subsidies. A federal judge has decided to accept the case. The federal government was desperate in trying to keep this case out of the courts, but it failed.
If the judge decides that the federal government does not have the right to grant the subsidies to insurance policies sold on the federal government's exchanges, individuals who bought the policies on the assumption that there would be subsidies will find that they own the policies, but they have no subsidies. They will find that they are paying astronomical prices for their healthcare insurance, and they're going to have to drop their policies.
If you think voters are upset today, wait until they are informed that they are owners of expensive healthcare policies that they cannot possibly afford, but they are not recipients of any kind of federal subsidy.
The Democrats sat down on the power keg in 2010. They lit the fuse. Not one Republican joined them in the lighting of this fuse. It is a slow-burning fuse, but it is now relentless. The Democrats figured there would be a large constituency in favor of ObamaCare in 2014. But they did not read the bill. They did not have time to read the bill. Nancy Pelosi assured them that it was not necessary that they read the bill. Nobody on their staffs read the bill. They should have read the bill.
If the judge decides that there can be no subsidies from the federal government to policies sold through the federal government, the government will have to appeal this to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court could decide not to hear the case. But it was a 5 to 4 decision in favor of the law, with Supreme Court Justice Roberts voting in favor of it on the technical issue that the tax was legitimate. This case will have to be decided on an issue that is not technical. It will have to be decided on what the law actually says. It will be decided on what the law does not say, and the law does not say that there can be any federal subsidies for policies bought through the federal government's exchange. The IRS has unilaterally decided that the subsidies are legitimate, but the law does not authorize this.
Chief Justice Roberts became the pariah of the public that opposed ObamaCare. He will have an opportunity to redeem himself. He can vote with the other four justices who opposed the law. That will saddle the buyers of the policies with the new premiums, and it will effectively kill the law's support.
But there is a problem. The law will stay on the books. The subsidies will go, but the law will remain. The only way to get rid of the law is to repeal it. That is right up the Republicans' alley.
The first stage of the repeal will be in the November 2014 election. That will replace the Democrats in the Senate. It will strengthen the hold of the Republicans on the House of Representatives.
Let us not forget that Hillary Clinton is chained and padlocked to the powder keg. The only piece of legislation that Hillary ever got her name associated with was HillaryCare. That was 20 years ago. It led to a victory of the Republicans in the House of Representatives in 1994. She has always been in favor of full-scale federal government healthcare, and she will have to run on that platform in 2016. She will not backtrack now. She will have to run on the assumption that there will be a Democrat majority in the Senate and the House in 2017, a majority committed to full-scale socialized health care: ObamaCare with teeth. "No more Mr. Nice Guy."
I don't think I would want to be a candidate running on that platform in 2016. Any Democrat who runs on that platform in 2016 had better be in a secure district in the House of Representatives, or else he had better be looking for another line of work in 2017 if he is in the Senate, or hopes to be.
American politics will be dominated for the next two election cycles by one overwhelming issue: ObamaCare. The words of Joe Louis are again in play: "He can run, but he can't hide." Joe said this back in 1946. That was the year that the Republicans took back both houses of Congress.
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