Robert King reports for the Washington Examiner on an interesting vote scheduled today on Capitol Hill.
The House is expected to vote on a bill Wednesday that guts major parts of Obamacare and that certainly will be vetoed by the president.
But some leading conservatives said the eventual defeat of the bill isn’t the point.
The House has tried more than 40 times to repeal the controversial healthcare bill, but such efforts have usually died in the Senate. This time, House Republicans crafted and passed a bill designed to bypass a Senate filibuster through the budget reconciliation process.
Reconciliation allows bills to have a majority vote instead of the 60 needed to end a filibuster, but the bill must deal with the budget and spending. Therefore, the repeal legislation sticks to parts of Obamacare that generate revenue, such as taxes and mandates.
Going through the process now creates a template for how to repeal Obamacare through a simple majority vote should a Republican win the White House in 2017, according to the conservative group Heritage Action.
“This isn’t just a showboat. This is a dry run for 2017,” said Dan Holler, spokesman for Heritage Action, the political advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation think tank. “By going through this now, in 2015, everybody can learn and be ready come 2017 to do the real thing.”
