Last week, Sen. Chuck Grasssley (R-IA) tried to temper expectations of repealing the Affordable Care Act in its entirety by bluntly admitting that even if the House manages to eliminate the law, the effort would fail in the Senate. “I think the House will pass a repeal of the ObamaCare. But I believe it will die in the Senate because there’s not 60 votes in the Senate for it,” he told a local Iowa radio station. “And even if it passed Congress, I think the president would veto it and so we wouldn’t get two-thirds to override the veto.”

In today’s Los Angeles Times, former Senate Minority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and outgoing Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) echo this point, but also suggest that the GOP is bound to try anyway, suggesting that the party is more interested in scoring political points than actually fixing anything in the law:

Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican who retired in 2007, said Republicans could help correct flaws in the sweeping law.

“The reality is that the law will largely remain intact. That being the case, it is important that it be made to work as effectively as possible,” Frist said. “And there are lots of things that can be fixed or modified by working together.” [...]

And Frist and others said Republicans had almost no incentive to work with Democrats, especially after Obama pushed through the legislation by using parliamentary tactics that circumvented GOP opposition. [...]

Utah Sen. Robert F. Bennett, a conservative Republican who voted against the law but lost a primary challenge this year to a “tea party”-backed candidate, said he did not expect any meaningful debate on healthcare next year.

“I would hope Republicans would be responsible enough to say, ‘All right, let’s construct something that works,’ which means, in my view, a bipartisan kind of effort,” he said. “But I’m afraid there may be some Republicans who say: ‘Well, we won the 2010 election by bashing what the Democrats did on healthcare. Maybe we can win the 2012 election by the same strategy.’ “

The bipartisan effort to repeal the 1099 reporting requirement will be the GOP’s first opportunity to prove that it’s willing to put its political considerations aside and focus on some of the more important policy fixes.

Repealing the 1099 reporting requirement will cost $17 billion and in September, Republicans tried to use this issue to dismantle key parts of the law by offering pay-fors that underfunded preventive care and weakened the individual mandate. Building consensus on how to make up the revenue shortfall wont’ be easy, but if the GOP continues to offer non-starter “message driven” proposals, small business groups will only have the GOP to blame if the 1099 requirement is not repealed.

The incoming House Republican majority has offered some new specifics over which parts of the Affordable Care Act they want to defund, telling CNN’s Senior Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash that are they considering blocking some $20 billion to implement the new law. That’s the idea from incoming GOP freshman Tim Scott (R-SC):

Scott of South Carolina, who sits on the House Republicans’ 22-member transition team, said he has already identified tens of billions to cut.

For example, he said there is some $20 billion that’s set to implement the health care bill that they can withhold. He also talked about cutting $7 billion from the federal budget by reducing federal travel by 50 percent.

“There are a lot of things we can look at,” said Scott. “The key is to have a panoramic view of what we’re walking into and make decisions.”

I’ve called the House Majority Transition Office to get more details on where they’re getting this $20 billion figure, since it seems a bit excessive. They haven’t gotten back to me yet, but a search of Congressional Budget Office estimates suggests that they’ve added a few large numbers together. Here is a May estimate from the CBO:

- Costs to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of implementing the eligibility determination, documentation, and verification processes for premium and cost-sharing credits. CBO expects that those costs will probably total between $5 billion and $10 billion over 10 years.

- Costs to HHS, especially the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Office of Personnel Management for implementing the changes in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as certain reforms to the private insurance market. CBO expects that those costs will probably total at least $5 billion to $10 billion over 10 years.

Republicans may strip the funding out in the House — although doing so carries its own set of political risks since they would be jeopardizing some very popular reforms — only to see it stall in the Senate and result in a stalemate that could lead to some very serious implications.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein describes this scenario: A Republican budget that greatly limits implementation funds “won’t move through Senate, so goes to conference where Democrats won’t yield.” “More than likely Democrats in the Senate would put through a continuing resolution until it could be resolved. Then you could see Republicans in the House, driven by new members saying they won’t cave, not sign off on the CR. That’s where you could get a shutdown of HHS,” he said.