…applies to Federal funding and getting bills passed, also.

Bill Buckley’s originally espoused recommendation was to find the most electable conservative candidate and support that candidate.  Notice that “electable” part.  It does conservatives no good at all to find the most ideologically pure candidate and support that one, when he cannot get elected in the venue in which he’s running.

Now there are Obamacare and Health and Human Services’ health care insurance exchanges.

Health and Human Services Department has already burned through all the dollars appropriated by the Affordable Care Act for implementation.  HHS is now demanding an extra $5.9 billion to set up the law’s insurance exchanges—$2 billion more than it estimated it would take last year—but both Senate Democrats and the House denied the request last month.

HHS responded by announcing that it would simply steal however many dollars it needs from a separate ObamaCare slush fund.  Supposedly devoted to “prevention,” this cash has been funneled to everything from bike-path signs to patronage for liberal pressure groups lobbying for fast-food taxes.  Now HHS is reaching into this till for at least $454 million this year, with no accountability.

House Republicans are planning to remove the remaining $5 billion from that slush fund and transfer the monies to an existing fund that supports insurance for Americans with preexisting medical conditions, a fund that’s currently broke and closed to new insuree wannabes.  Yeah, that fund is idiotic and ought to be done away with, too.  However.

The zeroing out and the transfer have a number of pluses.  For one thing, it would defang a far larger travesty of Obamacare—those government-run exchanges that are a precursor to an American version of Great Britain’s disastrous NHS.  For another thing, it would block another of President Barack Obama’s end-arounds of the expressed will of Congress, this time though his HHS, by leaving those Federally created…insurance exchanges…unfunded and un-set up.  For a third thing, it would force the Democrats in both the House and the Senate, as well as Obama himself, onto the record with their choice between covering sick people now (albeit it badly) or that long-duration HHS waste.

Finally, it comports with the Buckley Rule—it’s the most conservative move that’s actually doable.

Unfortunately, groups like Club for Growth and Heritage Action (the latter is the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, who really should know better) are doing their best to block even this much.  These chuckleheads want the conservatively pure full repeal of Obamacare or nothing.

Of course, in today’s environment they’ll get the nothing option.  They know this, but purity is more important to them than the most doable conservative option.

I wrote about chuckleheads before in another context.  It seems we still have too little shortage of them.