Democrats in Congress worry that Obamacare's rollout has left them vulnerable in 2014. | AP Photos ACA deadline tests Dem patience

Some Capitol Hill Democrats are preparing to launch broadsides against President Barack Obama if the Affordable Care Act website isn’t fixed by the end of the month.

That will come in the form of more aggressive scrutiny in Republican-led oversight hearings, open advocacy for further delay in the enrollment deadline and individual coverage mandate, and more calls for a staff shake-up in the White House.


“The president and his team have repeatedly assured us that the system will be working by Dec. 1. That’s when I start looking at what we have to do in our oversight function to hold the administration accountable for making it work.” Rep. Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat who is running for an open Senate seat said Thursday, adding that he’s contemplating whether to ask the president to fire members of his staff. “I’m thinking about those options. But my biggest concern is fixing the system and making it work.”

( Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO's guide to the Affordable Care Act)

Asked whether he was mad at the president, Braley hesitated for a few seconds amid the din of a Capitol hallway.

“Yes,” he said.

The building frustration — expressed in part Nov. 15 when 39 House Democrats voted for a GOP bill that would have let consumers keep expiring insurance plans — is driven by the fear that Obama’s failed rollout has suddenly left scores of Democrats vulnerable to defeat in the House and Senate.

These Democrats won’t win legislative changes without the assent of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — and likely Obama — but their public positioning could put unsustainable pressure on the administration’s efforts to hold the line on the current contours of the law. And while the House is scheduled to return to session on Dec. 3, the Senate won’t be back in from its Thanksgiving break until the week of Dec. 9.

But already, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is leading an upper-chamber push to allow people to keep their existing health plans. Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who has introduced his own plan to give people other health care options, recently said he thought the appropriate time to act was after Thanksgiving break.

“Let’s just wait and see what happens. We’re gonna — we’re gonna take two weeks off. I’m gonna visit with my five children together for the first time, 16 grandchildren, 44 people for Thanksgiving dinner. Let’s talk about that for a while,” Reid said last week.

( See POLITICO's full Obamacare coverage)

But in the meantime, Democratic lawmakers — particularly those on the House side — are preparing to try to put distance between themselves and the president because they’re not confident that the White House has a Plan B for getting the policy right or protecting them in the mid-term elections.

“I don’t sense that at all. When you think about it, a week after the October shutdown Democrats were experiencing a euphoric high. We thought we had Republicans on the mat. We thought we were going to win back the House and then this rollout fails,” said one House Democrat from a traditionally safe seat based in a major city. “Now, we need to be concerned, all of us, me included, that we aren’t viewed as ineffective and kicked out of our seats.”

Not only are Democrats watching helplessly as visions of taking over the House begin to dissolve, but they increasingly perceive the danger that the Senate could flip into GOP hands and that Obama’s final three years in office could be a total loss for their party’s agenda.

That is, the Affordable Care Act has a lot of Democrats feeling uninsured or under-assured by Obama.

White House officials, from the president on down, insist they don’t have to prepare a contingency plan — at least not in terms of the flawed website; it will be operating for the “vast majority” of consumers by the end of the month, they say.

“The truth is, we’re going to fix it,” Vice President Joe Biden said last Monday, adding a self-conscious appeal to a higher power for help. “God willing,” he said.

But the president’s promises don’t carry the same weight they once did with Democrats on Capitol Hill, and they’d like a little more to fall back on than Biden’s casual appeal for divine intervention. Soon, Democrats say, it won’t just be Republicans who are using high-profile hearings to tear into Obama administration officials.

( WATCH: Health care: What Obama said, why it mattered)

Democrats, anxious to separate themselves from Obama before the 2014 midterm election, are gearing up to use Capitol Hill hearings to point out examples of waste, fraud, abuse or just outright incompetence to try to persuade constituents that they aren’t responsible for the bungled rollout.

The big-city lawmaker predicted oversight hearings are “going to be ugly” come next month. “The more we find out about this implementation of the ACA, the worse it looks. The Congress did our job. We passed the ACA. It’s up to the administration to implement the law.”

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), a senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Thursday that if the website isn’t operating, as promised, by the end of the month, there won’t be enough time for consumers to sign up for the exchanges before the Dec. 15 deadline to begin receiving coverage on Jan. 1.

“If it’s not working substantially by the end of November then we have to think really hard about the Jan. 1 enrollment, because people will only have a couple of weeks,” DeGette said, hinting that there might be congressional Democratic support for a delay at that point. On Friday, the administration announced that it would allow another week — until Dec. 23 — for people to enroll and still begin receiving coverage at the start of the new year, but that may not be enough to please lawmakers who are frustrated that their constituents haven’t had as much time as they thought they would to sign up.

( Also on POLITICO: Zients: HealthCare.gov to double capacity by Nov. 30)

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough’s trip to Capitol Hill two weeks ago appeared to stave off a mass insurrection, but 39 Democrats still abandoned the president on the GOP bill. The vote was held the day after Obama announced his own competing administrative fix and a series of apologies to the American public — and fellow Democrats — which appeared to have the effect of lowering the count of defectors.

But while the one-two punch of Obama and McDonough spared the White House a full-scale embarrassment on the floor of the House, it didn’t quell anxiety or imbue Democrats with new faith that Obama can solve the problems with the Affordable Care Act rollout — or deal with the political flak that would hit if the site continues to fall short after the self-imposed deadline.

“There was an awful lot of eye-rolling when [McDonough] insisted that the website will be fixed in time for December 1, and he really didn’t offer a Plan B, but was adamant that it would be up and running,” said a House Democratic source who attended the meeting.

“At this point, I don’t think there is anyone that would express any confidence in the administration’s ability to right the ship,” said the source, adding that members seem to be “bracing for another tidal wave when Dec. 1 comes and goes and we are still dealing with a dysfunctional website, or ‘broken computer’ as the old-timers have been calling it.”

For now, Republican leaders in Congress are still discussing their options for how to handle the Nov. 30 deadline, but if the website falls short of White House predictions, there’s little doubt that they will pounce.

Administration officials say there’s no need for Democrats to wring their hands.

“We expect that the website will be working smoothly for the vast majority of users by the end of November,” said one administration official. “As [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] has said, this means that by the end of November, the vast majority of website users will be able to move faster through the system, see fewer error messages, experience less time-outs and be able to complete their application and enroll in one sitting smoothly if they choose to do so.”

The official pointed to reduced wait times on the website, lower error rates, and fewer problems with the entire site crashing as evidence that things have gotten better. But they couldn’t have gotten worse since the Oct. rollout, when only a relative handful of consumers were able to navigate the website at all.

No one is predicting perfection.

“As with any Web project, this is a dynamic online environment and a process that will be ongoing — we will continually be making enhancements, adding features and delivering new content and that will improve the user experience so we can best respond to ongoing consumer demand over time,” the administration official said.

None of this sounds good to the president’s allies outside the White House, even if most haven’t jumped ship on Obama yet.

”As far as I can tell, the Democratic leaders and most members are willing to give the administration the time they asked for to see if they can get the kinks ironed out of the website, but there is a lot of frustration right now on the Hill and time is running out,” Jim Manley, a former senior aide to Harry Reid who is now a senior director at Quinn Gillespie, said in an email. “Most understand that it is the wrong time to be talking about a Plan B, but everyone wants to be reassured that they have an idea of where they want to go and how they intend to get there, and I am not sure that is the case right now.”

They are particularly unhappy with Obama for setting a Nov. 30 deadline for fixing the website, even as he and his aides refuse to set a definable goal for achieving that. White House officials have talked about other options consumers can use to enroll — including in-person, telephone, and ground-mail signups. But those applications still have to be processed through a website that remains faulty, and lawmakers say the White House put too much emphasis on the Web and not enough on the other avenues, which they say might be more readily available to some of the poorest and sickest consumers who need health insurance.

Many Hill Democrats say they have no faith that the administration that botched the healthcare rollout in the first place can meet the expectations Obama has set, and they are afraid that he will fail to make good on yet another Affordable Care Act promise.

“It’s every member’s biggest fear and has been brought up at every caucus,” the Democratic source said. “I cannot even begin to tell you how many members have expressed, both at the caucus and privately, their frustration with the president for setting yet another red line.”

One Democratic House member, asked by text message whether he was worried that there didn’t seem to be a Plan B at the White House, wrote back, “Yes!!!”

DeGette said the administration has sought to assure her that the people spearheading the fix-it efforts at federal agencies and in the White House are the right men and women for the job.

”What people say to me is the people who are in charge now have the ability,” she said. “I hope they’re right.”

Manu Raju contributed to this report.