THEY'LL BE TRYING TO REPEAL OBAMACARE AGAIN SOON

A story in The Hill is titled "GOP Goes Quiet on Obamacare," but I think Ed Kilgore is right to cal this just a lull, not an abandonment of the holy cause. Sure, there's less talk about O'care in D.C. right now, but...

... if you look at the ongoing competitive Republican Senate primaries just past in North Carolina and just ahead in Nebraska and Georgia, there is no diminution in the intense focus on Obamacare, as candidates routinely accuse each other of insufficient fanaticism on the subject. In Nebraska, a major talking point against Ben Sasse is that he got paid by groups supporting the Affordable Care Act for making panel presentations attacking the law.

The Benghazi! fever is an independent phenomenon that has long afflicted the Republican body politic. There is no reason to assume its propagation is incompatible with a return to Obamacare agitation. My guess is that the "lull" in Washington on Obamacare is simply a matter of a relatively brief period in which no fresh news was available to feed that particular beast.

I'm going to stick with my theory that D.C. Republicans ratcheted up the Benghazi crusade at this moment in order to cast a pall over Hillary Clinton's upcoming book tour. Hillary's new book comes out on June 10. Remember that the Democrat currently in the White House was the author of a very successful memoir who then published a second memoir, a book that was an instant smash, and that he promoted on a tour on which he was treated like a rock star, a tour that, a few months later, was essentially transformed into a presidential campaign. Exactly the same thing seems about to happen to Hillary -- a smash-hit follow-up memoir, a book tour generating rock-star excitement, a presidential campaign that simply picks up where the book tour ends. Of course Republicans want to throw sand in the gears. Benghazi works as a Hillary attack in a way that Obamacare doesn't. But they're still trying to win in 2014, and they've got too much invested in Obamacare-hate to walk away now. I think we'll have some more repeal votes before November comes.