Congress Ready for High Court’s Health Care Decisions — Then It Gets Tricky
No matter how the Supreme Court rules on the challenge to the health care law, it will only be a matter of minutes after that ruling is announced before attention shifts back across the street to the Capitol and to what happens next there.
Congressional press aides will be ready. Democrats and Republicans have spent months honing their messages. House GOP leaders have held “listening sessions” with rank-and-file members, going through various scenarios. Republican leadership aides from the House and Senate have coordinated their messaging plans with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
After the ruling is announced, it will take seconds before staffers for both parties begin to flood reporters’ inboxes with news releases. They, and their bosses, also will take to Twitter and Facebook to quickly move to frame the political fallout for the other side.
The messages are already pre-written to respond to the three different rulings the court could hand down — it could overturn the law entirely, strike down parts of the law including the individual mandate requiring people to purchase insurance coverage or pay a fine, or allow it to stand.
A decision to overturn the law they dubbed “Obamacare” would be vindication for congressional Republicans who unanimously opposed it in 2009.
But House Speaker John Boehner made it clear he doesn’t want Republicans — who won back control of the House in 2010 in large part because of backlash to the law — to look insensitive by doing victory dances if the court rules all or part of it unconstitutional.