It's been 130 days since the House passed the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act, which Sen. Mitch McConnell has refused to take up, and it's eight days until the government runs out of funding with the end of the fiscal year. Oh, and the election is in 41 days.
The House is scheduled to vote today on the "clean" continuing resolution (CR) introduced Monday. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats have always made it a big deal to be the grown-ups fighting to keep government. So maybe this isn't the year to do that. Maybe this is a year for Democrats to take a hard line on a potential government shutdown. Maybe, just maybe, they could save the Affordable Care Act by doing that. If they attached a repeal of the individual mandate and passed it, the whole rationale for the Supreme Court case would be moot. There's leverage against the Senate to make that happen. Equally as important, it would force Senate Republicans to vote on saving health care. That's always helpful.
As it stands, Trump gets his nominee, the case gets heard on Nov. 10, and that's that. As soon as a Trump court rules, it's history. One way or another, Congress and the new president have to come back next year to save the ACA. Might as well give this a try. And put Republicans on the spot.
There's leverage now as McConnell would much rather be spending the next eight days lining up Trump's Supreme Court nominee's confirmation. He would much rather be distracting the nation from the official 200,000 dead people his negligence on the coronavirus contributed to. He would really like to avoid a government shutdown. His whole conference fervently wants to avoid that. They want to get the SCOTUS nominee done, fund the government, and get out of town to campaign.
Pelosi doesn't have to give them those things. There's an awful lot she could be asking for in this CR because she does have a lot of leverage right now. Yes, her members want to get home and campaign too, but guess what? The House Democratic majority isn't in jeopardy. The rest of the nation is.