The Winston Group’s David Winston gives some historical context to the current government shutdown in today’s Roll Call:
It’s important to remember that this is a crisis of the Democrats’ own making that goes back more than 15 years, with passage of the health care law in 2010. [The ACA] passed the Senate in December 2009, at a time when Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats, so passage was all but guaranteed. In the end, it passed on a strictly partisan vote without a single Republican on board and included a subsidy structure for low-income users but not the enhanced subsidies at issue today.
… Schumer and his fellow Democrats had an opportunity to make these enhanced subsidies permanent with passage of the Inflation Reduction Act three years ago but chose not to. After using the legislative process to minimize the impact of Republican votes dealing with the Affordable Care Act, the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, they now expect Republicans to do their job for them, make the subsidies permanent, and are willing to keep the government shut down indefinitely, regardless of the economic and national security impacts ahead.
Read the full piece here.
