On Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer mocked the Republican tactic of using the budget process to defund President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care reform law.
Krauthammer called the House’s vote to defund the law “Kabuki” and warned that it would come back to haunt congressional Republicans.
“I think the Boehner speech is what you would expect,” Krauthammer said. “He didn’t want to do it. He had to do it, so he had to defend it, and that’s Kabuki. I think it’s going to go to the Senate and if we end up with a shutdown, it’s going to be Kamikaze, and the Republicans will end up sushi — very thin slices. And everybody knows this. This is sort of a charade. Cruz is going to get a lot of airtime. He’s gotten a huge amount of airtime. There is nowhere to go on this.”
He did note the law was very unpopular and was fraught with flaws, but he said the Republicans could stand in the way of defeating it.
“The irony is as I have been saying for weeks, Obamacare is so unpopular even the unions are up in arms against it,” he said. “The AFL-CIO came within a hair of calling for its repeal. Right now they want all kinds of changes, which they are not going to get. You’ve got Democrats against it. It’s about to kick in and we heard today that they don’t even have the software that will enable the system to calculate what the subsidies are after hearing that they don’t have the software to ascertain what you say is your income and thus, your subsidy. It’s true, so it’s on an honor system. This is going to be a complete disaster. We’re on the threshold of that. As Chuck indicates, the Republicans were on the upswing of the issue and now this? It’s insane and it’s not going to happen.”