ObamaCare foes taking hostages: Our view

The Editorial Board | USA TODAY

Republicans' obsession with overturning ObamaCare is getting sillier and more dangerous at the same time. Now that they've failed to kill the law every way the rules allow — in Congress, the Supreme Court and in a presidential election — the opponents are taking hostages and, in effect, threatening to shoot them if they don't get their way.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the hostages are the federal government and the U.S. economy.

The first hostage was taken Friday, when the House's GOP majority passed a bill that would keep the government running after Sept. 30, but only if ObamaCare is defunded.

That's not going to happen.

President Obama isn't about to let his signature legislative achievement be gutted. And leaders of the Senate's Democratic majority have already declared that they'll strip out the ObamaCare language and return the funding bill to the House. At that point, the House will face a choice: Pass the Senate plan and keep the government running, or reject it and trigger a partial shutdown.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, lived through the last government shutdown, in 1995-96, and knows the heavy price the GOP paid. But Boehner is outsourcing the decision to his Tea Party wing, which apparently sees ObamaCare the same way Captain Ahab saw the great white whale: worth any price to kill. Making matters worse are threats from conservative groups, such as the Club for Growth, that they'll support primary challenges against Republican lawmakers who stray from the anti-ObamaCare crusade.

If there's a comic aspect to all this, it's how much the extremism is being driven by schoolyard taunting between House and Senate Republicans about who hates ObamaCare the most.

But the potential impacts of their strategy, if that's what you can call something destined to fail, are distinctly un-funny.

The GOP hard-liners' contempt for the federal bureaucracy blinds them to the consequences of a government shutdown. In 1995-96, small businesses suffered as government contracts went on hold, National Parks and passport offices were closed, benefits for 3 million veterans were threatened and close to a million federal workers had to go without pay for weeks.

Even if a shutdown is averted with another last-minute deal to fund the government temporarily, the fight won't be over. The Republican Plan B is to attach language delaying ObamaCare for a year to a bill raising the nation's borrowing limit. Cooler heads in both parties have long warned that messing with the debt limit is extraordinarily dangerous. Even the hint that the U.S. government could default on the world's safest and most liquid form of debt — Treasury instruments — could have terrible consequences for interest rates and the nation's economy.

Boehner and other House leaders who have indulged conservative tantrums know both the nation and their party would be hurt by an unnecessary government shutdown, and grievously damaged by a failure to raise the debt ceiling.

At some point, they need to tell their nominal followers the truth about health reform: This is a democracy. You lost on one issue. Move on.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.