Why House GOP is pushing doomed health-care repeal – again

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try some 30 more times – at least if you’re House Republicans, who will vote to repeal President Obama’s health-care reform law in total for the second time Wednesday afternoon, making their 33rd overall whack at defunding, rolling back, or otherwise attempting to short-circuit the law.

So will the GOP’s second full repeal of the law be the charm? Hardly. The measure won’t see the light of day in the Democrat-held Senate. But it will serve several political purposes for both parties.

Republicans will use the vote as election-year fodder to fire up their conservative base, turn up the heat on vulnerable Democrats from conservative-leaning districts, and press their argument that Mr. Obama’s health-care reforms are shackling the economy.

Democrats, on the other hand, dismissed the vote as a political charade, attacking Republicans for taking their eye off the economy and failing to offer their own plan to replace the law the GOP derides as “Obamacare.”

The measure speaks to a core concern of many conservative voters – 86 percent of Republicans surveyed by CNN/ORC in late June and early July favored a total repeal of the measure.

And it’s not just among Republicans that conservative lawmakers believe they’ve got a winning issue. They believe that when Obamacare is in the headlines – as it was during the 2010 wave election that brought Republicans back into power in the House – GOP candidates win.

“The Supreme Court’s decision forces Obamacare to be litigated in the 2012 elections, and in virtually every case where Obamacare has been litigated by voters in an election, the law and its supporters lose,” wrote Jonathan Collegio, communications director for GOP "super political-action committee" American Crossroads, in a statement shortly after the Supreme Court ruled the law constitutional in late June.

This issue is top-of-mind for some vulnerable Democrats. Two embattled North Carolina members, Reps. Mike McIntyre and Larry Kissell, voted with Republicans on a procedural matter related to the vote on Tuesday. (They were joined by two other retiring Democrats, Reps. Dan Boren of Oklahoma and Mike Ross of Arkansas.)

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