Republicans Get Ready for Their ‘I Told You So’ Moment

After weeks of bruis­ing polit­ic­al losses and tank­ing polling num­bers, Re­pub­lic­ans are ready to gain some ground back with an “I told you so” mo­ment.

Health and Hu­man Ser­vices Sec­ret­ary Kath­leen Se­beli­us will ap­pear be­fore a House pan­el “as early as next week” and will ad­dress is­sues with the health care web­site, de­part­ment of­fi­cials are con­firm­ing. And after months of say­ing the health care law was a fail­ure, this might be the time to drive that point home.

In what ap­peared to be a top-down co­ordin­ated ef­fort, House Re­pub­lic­ans spent much of Monday pres­sur­ing Se­beli­us to testi­fy be­fore Con­gress. It star­ted with tweets from Speak­er John Boehner and Ma­jor­ity Lead­er Eric Can­tor in rare, dir­ect mes­sages to Se­beli­us.

Sec. @Se­beli­us, @House­Com­merce is hold­ing a hear­ing on the #hcr roll out this Thursday; the Amer­ic­an people would love to hear from you.

— Speak­er John Boehner (@Speak­er­Boehner) Oc­to­ber 21, 2013

Pres­id­ent Obama should im­me­di­ately in­struct @Se­beli­us to testi­fy in Con­gress this week on the status of the health care ex­changes.

— Eric Can­tor (@GOPLead­er) Oc­to­ber 21, 2013

Much of the Re­pub­lic­an caucus fol­lowed suit and re­mains on mes­sage, mock­ing the sec­ret­ary in tweets throughout much of the day. 

Re­pub­lic­ans had sched­uled a House Com­mit­tee on En­ergy and Com­merce hear­ing for this Thursday, but Se­beli­us is sched­uled to be out of town and can’t make it.

Her ap­pear­ance and what is likely to be an in­tense con­gres­sion­al hear­ing comes days after the gov­ern­ment shut­down spec­tacle that gave the Re­pub­lic­an Party some of its low­est num­bers in re­cent years.

White House press sec­ret­ary Jay Car­ney punted on ques­tions of wheth­er Se­beli­us would testi­fy be­fore Con­gress this week, re­fer­ring re­port­ers to the Health and Hu­man Ser­vices De­part­ment for those ques­tions.

“I would say that the de­part­ment has con­sist­ently en­gaged with and worked with Con­gress and I am sure that the de­part­ment will con­tin­ue to do that,” Car­ney said when pressed.

The web­site for the Af­ford­able Care Act has been plagued with glitches and mal­func­tions since its rol­lout sev­er­al weeks ago. Re­pub­lic­ans were quick to jump on these is­sues, ty­ing them to what they say are broad­er is­sues with the health care law.

However, much of this news was shad­owed by the gov­ern­ment shut­down and im­pend­ing de­fault on Amer­ica’s loans.

But with that re­solved, Re­pub­lic­ans have turned their at­ten­tion back to­ward the law, and it looks like the Amer­ic­an people are listen­ing. Ac­cord­ing to a new ABC News/Wash­ing­ton Post poll re­leased Monday, 56 per­cent of Amer­ic­ans tie the glitches to the web­site to broad­er im­ple­ment­a­tion prob­lems with the health care law.

Speak­ing to a group of sup­port­ers at the White House on Monday, Pres­id­ent Obama said that al­though he was frus­trated with these prob­lems, he still de­fen­ded the law. He also cri­ti­cized Re­pub­lic­ans for say­ing that these is­sues prove that the law is a fail­ure.

“I just want to re­mind every­body, we did not wage this long and con­ten­tious battle just around a web­site,” Obama said.

Still, Re­pub­lic­ans are look­ing for a fight to re­cap­ture some ground lost with the Amer­ic­an pub­lic. This might be their way back.