Pledging to Repeal

Duncan Currie

Pledging to Repeal

GOP candidates are coalescing around an anti-Obamacare message.

The same day that President Obama signed health-care reform, Sen. Jim DeMint introduced legislation to repeal it. “This fight isn’t over yet,” vowed the South Carolina Republican. “The American people cherish their freedom and will defend it this November.” His bill, which has 14 other Senate co-sponsors, may seem quixotic; it obviously won’t pass anytime soon, and the GOP is divided on how exactly “repeal” would work. Yet the broader movement that DeMint has championed may play a significant role in the 2010 elections.

Back in mid-January, well before the House of Representatives approved Obamacare, the free-market Club for Growth (CFG) began asking federal lawmakers, candidates, and ordinary citizens to pledge their support for a repeal-and-replace strategy. As of Thursday afternoon, 67 incumbent House and Senate members had signed the CFG’s online “Repeal It” pledge, along with 287 official candidates. None of them are Democrats (no surprise there), but the Republican signatories include moderates and conservatives alike.

“We’ve gotten pledges from all over the country,” says CFG spokesman Mike Connolly. Among GOP Senate hopefuls, the pledgers include everyone from Illinois congressman Mark Kirk (who co-chairs the “Tuesday Group,” a collection of moderate House Republicans, and who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy bill), to California businesswoman Carly Fiorina (the erstwhile Hewlett-Packard CEO who advised the 2008 McCain campaign), to former Florida house speaker Marco Rubio (who has emerged as a darling of national conservatives).

The language for candidates reads as follows: “I hereby pledge to the people of my district/state upon my election to the U.S. House of Representatives/U.S. Senate, to sponsor and support legislation to repeal any federal health care takeover passed in 2010, and replace it with real reforms that lower health care costs without growing government.”

As of Thursday afternoon, the most prominent Republican Senate candidates who had not signed the CFG pledge were Tom Campbell of California, Mike Castle of Delaware, Dan Coats and John Hostettler of Indiana, Charlie Crist of Florida, Linda McMahon and Rob Simmons of Connecticut, and Rob Portman of Ohio. Yet nearly all of them have publicly endorsed some version of “repeal and replace.”


The one partial exception is Castle, the GOP frontrunner to capture Joe Biden’s old Senate seat. In a statement on March 23, the nine-term Delaware congressman declared, “While this president is in office, repealing this full law is not realistic and not the best use of our efforts,” adding that various components of the bill — such as closing the Medicare Part D doughnut hole and covering preexisting conditions — “will immediately improve the lives of Americans” and should thus “remain intact.” More recently, however, Castle told an audience of Republicans that it might be possible to repeal Obamacare sometime after the next presidential election. “I’d be willing to consider it,” he said. As for the CFG pledge — which Castle’s underdog primary opponent, Christine O’Donnell, has signed — the communications director in his House office reports that Castle “does not sign pledges in general.”

Making the pledge is “a way for people in a primary to clarify their position,” says Connolly. It’s also a way for Republican House candidates to put pressure on anti-Obamacare Democrats running in conservative-leaning swing districts. While 34 House Democrats opposed the legislation that passed on March 20, how many would call for its abolition? “I don’t think there are more than seven Democrats in the House who really wanted to vote against this bill,” says Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist.

For his part, President Obama has goaded Republicans to bang the drum of repeal. “If they want to have that fight, we can have it,” he told an Iowa crowd on March 25. After all, even if the legislation as a whole is deeply controversial, individual provisions (such as the ones cited by Castle) are widely popular. That helps explain why some GOP lawmakers and candidates are reluctant to promote a blanket repeal of the bill. Republican leaders are also wary of fostering misguided expectations about what will be possible with Obama in the White House.

Yet on balance, the party seems to be coalescing behind the repeal-and-replace message, even as it continues to debate tactics. The long-term political impact of Obamacare is uncertain; but the willingness of so many blue-state Republican Senate candidates to urge its repeal shows where the momentum is right now.

— Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.