The Week summarizes conventional punditry wisdom: Can the GOP repeal health care reform?

[BurtWorm]

Conventional pundits smell gas--and if anyone knows gas when they smell it, it's conventional pundits!

http://theweek.com/article/index/209023/can-the-gop-repeal-health-care-reform

Can the GOP repeal health care reform?

The Republicans' Congressional leaders are vowing to kill — or cripple — the Democrats' key accomplishment. But can they really deliver?
posted on November 5, 2010, at 10:32 AM


Best Opinion: CS Monitor, Economist, Slate

The Republican leaders in the House and Senate, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have doubled down on their election pledge to repeal the Democrats' landmark health care reform bill. But even after their big losses Tuesday, Democrats still control the Senate and, of course, the White House. Are Boehner and McConnell making empty threats, or can they really find a way to defeat President Obama's signature domestic achievement? <link to Fox News deleted>

Republicans have plenty of tools: The Senate and the Obama veto are "formidable roadblocks," says Gail Russell Chaddock in The Christian Science Monitor. But Republicans still have "wide scope for delaying or derailing implementation of health care reform." And they'll use every tool — frequent, embarrassing repeal votes; endless House oversight hearings; budget maneuvers — because their new Tea Party colleagues will demand it.
"After big GOP gains, will it be repealed?"

The GOP's tactics will backfire: Every one of the GOP's proposals to weaken Obamacare "either increases the cost of health care and the size of the federal deficit, or has no effect on them," says The Economist. The GOP complains that Obamacare is a budget buster, but then wants to strip out the cost controls that pay for it. Voters elected Republicans to shrink the deficit, but the speed with which the party is abandoning its fiscal-responsibility mandate is "pretty striking."
Republican priorities on Obamacare"

Republicans can't not try: If you "read between the lines" of what Boehner and McConnell are saying, says David Weigel in Slate, you'll see "the first notes of compromise" and signs that not even they "actually think they can achieve" repeal. And they can't — but that won't get them off the hook with the Tea Partiers who gave them their big victory. So they'll try, and fail, and hope this "education through futility" will be enough.
"What would Pelosi do?"

[littlewolf]

1. they can not repeal it ... not without the senate ...

However the house has the "power of the purse" they control all spending ....
and they have the power of subpoena and can force the administration to
defend each and every part of it .... in front of live television cameras ....
it could get very messy ....

[BurtWorm]

2. And yet, some in the GOP might have learned the lessons of 1998

the most important of which is, caveat Inquisitors.

I don't think the baggers will have learned that lesson--which is excellent news for Obama and the Democrats.