Two Republicans who have provided some intellectual leadership for the GOP have signaled in recent days that “defunding” the Affordable Care Act may sound good on the surface, but won’t really work in practice.

On Friday, the American Spectator published an interview with Rep. Paul Ryan, in which the GOP ranking member on the House budget committee said of President Obama:

I get this question every single day, ‘If you take back Congress, you have the power of the purse, just defund the thing.’ Well, yeah, technically speaking, we can put riders in appropriations bills that say, ‘No such funds can go to HHS to do x, y, or z in implementing ObamaCare.’ He’s gotta sign those things. And he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would sign those things.