Marc Thiessen: Democrats Shut Down the Government to Protect COVID Spending, Not Obamacare

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It's really worth reading this whole (IMO devastating) op-ed:

Let’s be clear about what is happening in Washington right now: Democrats just shut down the federal government to force Donald Trump to continue Joe Biden’s covid-era pandemic spending. Republicans should never agree to make that spending permanent.
Democrats claim they are trying to preserve Obamacare tax credits. Wrong. They are trying to preserve American Rescue Plan tax credits. The subsidies in question were not part of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act; they were passed in President Biden’s disastrous $1.9 trillion covid spending bill, which unleashed the worst inflation in four decades.
The American Rescue Plan was a self-inflicted wound on the U.S. economy. Congress passed a $900 billion economic stimulus package a few weeks before Biden took office, on top of the earlier pandemic relief measures Congress had approved. By the time Biden got to the White House, the economy had already turned the corner and was growing at more than 6 percent.
But Biden wanted credit for the post-covid recovery. So, in his first major act as president, he rammed through a massive package of supposedly temporary social spending disguised as pandemic relief — including sending millions of Americans stimulus checks, providing the largest child tax credit payments ever and extending ludicrously generous unemployment supplements.
The American Rescue Plan also expanded Obamacare subsidies, broadening who qualified for those subsidies by eliminating the income eligibility ceiling that had been set at 400 percent of the federal poverty level. This made millions more Americans eligible for taxpayer subsidies — including households with six-figure incomes — and provided much larger subsidies to previously eligible households compared with Obamacare rules.
Not a single Republican voted for Biden’s fiscal monstrosity. Sensible Democrats warned it was an impending disaster. Former Clinton treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers cautioned in 2021 that it would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Obama economic adviser Jason Furman said he didn’t know of “any economist that was recommending something [that] size.” They were right.
Biden’s Obamacare expansion, like all his covid spending, was sold to the American people as a temporary relief measure. The Biden administration said the American Rescue Plan would “build a bridge towards economic recovery.” That is why the covid-enhanced Obamacare subsidies were set to expire on Jan. 1, 2023. Then, Democrats extended the expiration date to Jan. 1, 2026, as part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Remember, both of these bills were passed with Democratic votes alone — which means Democrats are responsible for setting the deadline for these covid subsidies to expire. Now they are demanding that Republicans do what Democrats failed to when they had unified control of government and make Biden’s covid health care subsidies permanent — and they have taken the federal government hostage in an attempt to force Republicans to do so.

It's also worth mentioning, though, that, contra GOP rhetoric, the Dems are not, so far as I can tell, shutting down the government in order to fund medical care for illegal aliens. States that fund such nonsense do it with their own money.