What grave business is the House of Representatives undertaking today? It is voting to do away with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—or, as the name of the bill puts it, on the Repeal of Obamacare Act. The title has a certain appealing conciseness, relative to what some of the other partial or entire repeal bills have been called, like the Religious Freedom Tax Repeal Act or the Repealing the Job-Killing Health-Care Law Act—Eric Cantor introduced that one, which stands as a true classic of the bill-title genre. (Reuters has a list of more.)

The names have been the bill-sponsors’ only real accomplishment, even though repeals have passed the House again and again—some thirty times, in various forms, since the G.O.P. got its majority, in 2010. Sometimes it’s been been brazen and loud (the NObamacare Act of 2012—isn’t there a ban on legislative names that rely on capitalization tricks?). And sometimes there’s an amendment that comes to Congress, as the saying goes, on little cat feet, attached to a big bill. All the significant ones have died, though, as everyone knew they would, and as today’s will as well, before getting anywhere near Senate passage, let alone the President’s desk. (If he signed it “NObama,” would that count as a veto?) The Republicans have some legislative options—reconciliation, debt-ceiling-collapsing blackmail—but not good ones. So why do they bother?

One answer that has been presented is that this is a symbolic vote. Symbols aren’t all bad. One of the purposes of a legislature is as a place where hopeless bills can be heard and argued over and stands can be taken. There can be a moment, as with the civil-rights bills that for decades died in the Senate, when the lonely cause becomes law. (Robert Caro tells that story brilliantly in the third volume of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.) But even if it doesn’t, Congress is an appropriate place for shouting (as long as other speakers aren’t shouted down). However one feels about the A.C.A., it is strange to criticize members of Congress for politicized debates, when their business is politics. Showiness, to the extent that it turns our legislature into a locus of debates over the direction of the country, is not out of place.

When it comes to health care, Congress is certainly a better place for that than the Supreme Court was. As Jeffrey Toobin noted in his Comment in the current issue of the magazine, it is a little bizarre that the law came as close as it did to being overturned, given that, in the light of precedent, its constitutionality always looked sound. (This is also why the sections of John Roberts’s opinion dealing with the Commerce Clause are strikingly radical.) If the Republican Party wants to present a picture of the country as it would look under a President Romney with a compliant legislature, let them give it a try. It’s the Democrats’ job to argue back, and to explain their own vision. (It’s the one that involves millions more Americans having health insurance.)

There are some qualifications there. If one is going to introduce endless bills, it is helpful to actually want to do something. The repeal effort has more in common with simple obstructionism than it does with any sort of drive forward; it is, in effect, an un-crusade. There is also an odd dynamic at work when the House becomes the site of flights of fancy for which there is no accountability or cost—pass anything!—precisely because the Senate has become the chamber of the filibuster, the place where nothing ever happens. (George Packer has written about the sorry state of the Senate.) You need sixty votes to even give a bill a chance in the Senate; in the House, it seems, all you need is a shamelessly polemical name for it.

But that is not the real problem with the repeal efforts. For years and endless roll calls, there was an impression that another set of no-votes was also symbolic: the ones against raising the debt ceiling so that the United States could meet its obligations. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t symbolic any more, and we came close to a self-induced international financial fiasco. Congress, despite how it sometimes looks, is not a playhouse, but a place where laws that change and can improve or devastate lives either pass or fail. The Republicans need to ask themselves if repeal is really what they want (as the Times reports, some, not particularly wanting to campaign for excluding people with preëxisting conditions, aren’t sure). Given the pre-New Deal ideology that has taken hold of the G.O.P., that may indeed be the party’s goal. If so, then the rest of us need to hold them accountable for their lack of an alternative: fifty million Americans do not have health insurance, and that is unsustainable for a country anything like the one we’ve dreamed for generations of being. Congress is a fine place to argue. The voting booth is the best place to make a decision.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.