After the Fall

Republicans said stopping health-care reform was a battle for the country's soul. So what do they do now that they've lost?

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Sunday was a tough day for the loyal opposition, and you could gauge early on just how hard Republicans took the Democrats' impending win on health-care reform. During ABC's morning political show This Week, conservative political guru Karl Rove whipped out a whiteboard covered in scribbles to dispute the Congressional Budget Office's estimation that the health-care bill will cut the deficit. Debating the issue with President Obama's erstwhile campaign manager, David Plouffe, sent Rove into hysteria: "For God's sake, will you stop throwing around epithets and deal with the facts for once, David!" How the mighty have fallen.

Rove isn't the only casualty. The vaunted tea partiers, who terrified the entire Democratic caucus as recently as last August, spent the day just outside the House chambers, waving every flag they could get their hands on and demanding that representatives "kill the bill." As the House of Representatives moved, vote by glacial vote, to approve the Senate's health-reform legislation and a package of fixes to be approved by the Senate in coming days, the crowd slowly dissipated until only a group of hoarse hardliners remained. By end of the night, nearly all of the remaining demonstrators were pro-reform.
Even the normally laconic Republican leader John Boehner gave a rousing speech before the final vote, shouting, arguing with the chamber's presiding officer over rules, and warning darkly of punishment to come: "We have failed to listen to America … This is the people's house, and the moment the majority forgets it, they are on their way to the minority."

So what do Republicans do now? They claimed that if the bill passed it would "cripple free enterprise" (Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers), "lay the cornerstone of [the Democrats'] socialist utopia on the backs of the American people" (Rep. Devin Nunes), or become "the death of freedom" (Rep. Marsha Blackburn). What do they do the day after freedom dies?
Well, they aren't planning to just accept the actions of the people's duly elected representatives as legitimate—you can't promise Stalin and end up with some health-care co-ops. So they are adopting a new set of tactics. LinkHere