On Thursday’s “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” on the Fox News Channel, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan proposed a strategy that would make it much easier for House Republicans to show that the Obama administration and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, not Republicans, are forcing the issue of Obamacare.
The author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” suggested that House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio break up the budget in a piecemeal fashion, department by department, then send it to the Senate. That would force Reid to give an up-or-down vote on certain integral parts of the government without the all-or-nothing approach that would include funding for Obamacare.
“Boehner gets up in front of a television camera and says ‘Does Harry Reid want us to put Obamacare into the Pentagon budget or not? If he doesn’t, let’s leave the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines out of this,’” Buchanan said. “Let’s send that forward. You do that with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, then you do it with State and CIA. Then do it with the Department of Justice, then Transportation and Energy, one by one.”
“And the point here is to demonstrate the reality, the truth, which is that it is Obama and the Democratic Senate pointing the gun at the Republicans saying you are either going to fund Obamacare or we are going to let the government halt and go under and we will blame you,” he continued. “And the truth is it’s not the Republicans defunding the government.”
This wouldn’t be unprecedented, according to Buchanan. The former Nixon and Reagan aide explained that this was once how budgeting was done. If Boehner implemented this method under current circumstances, Buchanan said, the onus would be on Reid and his caucus.
“When I was younger the budgets came department by department down the street,” Buchanan said. “That’s what I would do. I think the Republicans need some imagination and they need a strategy. I think this would work. Can you imagine Harry Reid refusing to pass a budget, continuing resolution for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and veterans when the Republicans are hammering him and he says ‘I’m not going to do that until you pass Obamacare,’ which the American people think it is an abomination?”