In high-level strategy sessions on Capitol Hill, Republicans are going through reams of historical information and sitting through marathon slide show presentations, trying to figure out how to gut Obamacare through a complicated budget process that requires only a simple majority — a sign of how seriously they’re taking their best shot yet at dealing a long-term blow to the health care law.

Behind closed doors, Washington’s top budget experts have quietly met with Sen. Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader, and the Senate Republican Conference to detail options for action next year.


In a session with about a dozen senior GOP aides last month, the staff director for Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee privately laid out various scenarios that could occur when the Senate’s parliamentarian weighs in on the GOP’s Obamacare moves.

And the conservative Senate Steering Committee has put together three giant binders of information detailing the budget wars dating back to 1986, turning piles of data into a 28-page PowerPoint presentation being distributed to senators and staff laying out the kinds of procedural hurdles that could thwart their efforts. The process they are considering, known as “reconciliation,” has been used by Congress in the past to avoid a minority’s filibuster of controversial bills, including Obamacare itself.

While no one believes repealing the Affordable Care Act is feasible with President Barack Obama still in office, Republicans are eager to use a special procedure that might let them kill at least a large piece of the law — potentially the Medicaid expansion, subsidies for purchasing health insurance or even the individual mandate — with only a simple majority.

Whether Republicans can navigate the byzantine Senate rules successfully will set a key precedent: It will show voters exactly how they would execute a strategy to gut the health care law should they take back the White House and keep control of Congress in 2016.

Asked how deep Republicans were in planning on this front, incoming Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn deadpanned.

“Up to my neck,” the Texas Republican said.

Private talks over the matter began in the summer of 2012, when the GOP thought it would take back the White House and Senate. But with control of both chambers in 2015, the budget strategy has picked up new urgency and will be a prime focal point of a rare joint Senate-House GOP retreat in January in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Plus, the GOP moves in the next Congress could very well set precedents that will tell lawmakers just how far they can go in gutting the law through the filibuster-proof budget process; if Republicans succeed, they will have new hope if they take the White House in 2016 and don’t have to worry about a presidential veto.

Also factoring into the conversations is whether Republicans want to use the fast-track budget process on Obamacare at all. Because of the strict rules, they can use it for Obamacare or another top priority — corporate tax reform — but it’s unlikely they can use it for both.

When asked whether he wants to use the budget to target Obamacare, current House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who will soon be in charge of tax laws as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was noncommittal.

“You don’t get a lot of cracks at it,” Ryan said of a budget reconciliation vote. “So we want to preserve our options with reconciliation and just maintain flexibility going forward. It’s a very important tool.”

The complexities of the process mean Republicans must tread carefully. Even as they engage in a public flogging of the law, including Tuesday’s much-anticipated House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing with former White House health care adviser Jonathan Gruber, the private strategy sessions about the law have been deliberate and filled with minutiae of the Senate’s arcane procedures that could have huge political ramifications.

“I think there’s always a risk if you overstep,” said Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), a member of the Senate Budget Committee.

Key decisions over how far Republicans should go will have to be made early in the next Congress, when the GOP will control both chambers for the first time since the George W. Bush era, and it will require a series of steps — each more complicated than its predecessor. First, the House and Senate must agree on an overall nonbinding budget resolution, which sets overall tax-and-spending guidelines for Congress to follow. In that resolution, Congress may include “reconciliation” instructions, directing congressional panels to propose binding legislation aimed at reconciling tax and spending laws to meet the goals of the budget.

Reconciliation bills are potent weapons, since they cannot be filibustered in the Senate and are subject to just 20 hours of debate, meaning one can pass quickly just by Republicans on a party-line vote. While Obama might still veto a reconciliation bill, this process is the only chance Republicans have to send a repeal bill to his desk, something that could tell the GOP just how far it can go next time it takes the White House.

Assuming Congress adopts a budget resolution, which itself is an extremely difficult task, Republicans can then draft reconciliation legislation repealing parts or all of the health care law. But it’s up to the interpretation of the Senate’s chief referee, Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, whether those provisions violate the so-called Byrd rule, which prohibits the inclusion of provisions in reconciliation bills that increase the deficit within a certain time frame or do not change spending or revenue.

Whichever Republican is presiding over the Senate at the time the parliamentarian rules can overrule the decision, but to do so would bring accusations of politicizing the process.

But many of these fights with MacDonough will happen behind closed doors — a process known as the “Byrd bath.” And Republicans are preparing to convince the parliamentarian that their arguments should win. The Senate Steering Committee’s presentation is entitled “Budget Reconciliation and the Byrd Rule,” while the chief Senate GOP Budget Committee aide, Eric Ueland, privately discussed the issue last month with top Republican staffers. Ueland declined to comment.

GOP budget experts assume that the health law’s tax subsidies — the root of a 2015 Supreme Court case — as well as the Medicaid expansion and individual mandate — could qualify for repealunder reconciliation. But some of the GOP’s biggest targets — restoring a 40-hour workweek, repealing the medical device tax and killing an independent board that recommends Medicare cuts — could increase the deficit and potentially be ruled out of order.

Hazen Marshall, a former Senate Budget Committee staff director who is now a partner at the Nickles Group, met recently with McConnell and the Senate Republican Conference over lunch to discuss options, sources said. Marshall declined to comment on his meetings with McConnell.

But when asked about options on reconciliation, Marshall said some members would like to try using the procedure to repeal the whole law but worry that might be unsuccessful because repeal could increase the deficit, according to official estimates. Overriding that would require 60 votes, or Republicans could add provisions to the reconciliation bill that would offset the deficit increase of the repeal bill.

The Congressional Budget Office has previously estimated that repealing the law would increase the deficit by upward of $100 billion, though a recent analysis by Senate Republican Budget Committee staff disputes that assertion, arguing that keeping the health care law would add $131 billion to the deficit over a decade.

Pursuing partial repeal is “a lot messier, for sure, but in the end, that might be where they have to go,” Marshall said. “No one will know the answer [to what can be repealed] until both sides go down and stand in front of the parliamentarian and argue their case.”

While the GOP base wants to see immediate action to gut Obamacare, doing so through the budget process could jeopardize an issue that could potentially become law — like tax reform. That’s because if Obama were to veto reconciliation legislation with an Obamacare repeal, the GOP would not be allowed to draft a second reconciliation bill focused on tax reform.

“But I think if we used it for Obamacare changes as opposed to tax reform, yeah, it probably makes the other more difficult,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), No. 3 in GOP leadership. “It would be hard to do both.”

Minority parties have long accused the majority of running roughshod by using the reconciliation process to enact its priorities — since the mechanism was primarily created as a way to push through deficit-cutting measures. Instead, it’s been used to enact the majority party’s political agenda — as in 2001 and 2003 to enact Bush’s tax cuts, and in 2010, when Democrats passed part of the health care law. (Republicans were forced to sunset the tax cuts after 10 years in order to meet the deficit requirements under the budget rules.)

As they weigh their options, Republicans are closely monitoring a significant Supreme Court case, King v. Burwell, which the court is expected to rule on in June. The case will determine whether people in 37 states can continue to receive tax subsidies to help them buy insurance, a key aspect of the law.

Republicans say that, if the court rules for King, the rest of the law might be inoperable. If King loses, then the reconciliation process could very well target the subsidies.

“That alone is enough to bring down the health care law,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). “We’re going to continue to try to one, repeal; two, strip out the worst parts of the law; and three, look to the courts.”