Below The Beltway

Dan Larison makes this excellent point about the rumblings we’re hearing from Republicans about running on a promise to repeal the health care reform bill if it passes:

One of the major problems we face as a nation is the complete inability to dismantle an entitlement once it is established. Every entitlement typically creates a constituency that benefits from it and is forever dedicated to its defense. The most electorally significant resistance to the current legislation has come from Medicare loyalists who wish to preserve it just as it is, and it may be that even this is not enough. While Republicans have been able to tap into the fear that Medicare will have to be cut, a repeal effort will tap into a much smaller electoral base that never wanted health care legislation of any kind passed.

And, as James Joyner notes, its an electoral base that isn’t necessarily cohesive:

The problem for a Repeal movement is that the anti-HCR coalition is one of exceedingly strange bedfellows, ranging from principled opposition to further government involvement in the system, Progressives who insist on the public option, fair-minded types who don’t like the parliamentary tricks involved, and those who intensely like one or more parts of the current proposal. Once a bill is passed, many of those people will either melt away or start work on further socializing our health care system.

Or, they’ll just move on to the next topic du jour.

Added to this is the simple fact that repealing ObamaCare is not as simple as taking back the House and Senate in November:

[E]ven if the Republicans take control of both Houses of Congress in November, something which is possible but at the moment not likely, any repeal legislation they put forward would run smack into the brick wall of Barack Obama’s veto pen. Since it’s unlikely that Republicans would get majorities in both the House and Senate sufficient to override a veto, that means that any effort at repeal between 2011 and 2013 would be little more than a political exercise leading up to the 2012 elections.

Even after 2013, assuming that Obama is defeated in 2012 of course, repeal would prove difficult unless Republicans had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Additionally, it’s worth noting that, with the exception of the ill-fated Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, there has not been a single instance in American history of an “entitlement” program being repealed after it went into effect. By 2013, ObamaCare will start to become an entrenched part of the American economy.

So let’s be honest with ourselves.

Whatever passes today, and however it gets amended by the Senate, will, unless struck down by the Supreme Court, be with us for a long time.