A number of conservatives, including yours truly, have been wary about backing Mitt Romney because of the health care reforms he signed as Governor of Massachusetts, i.e., Romneycare.  And although he has repeatedly (and explicitly) said that if elected, he would repeal Obamacare, some on the right remain unconvinced.

His campaign has even touted his commitment to repeal as this telling image from the Los Angeles Times indicates:

Note the shadow of the candidate on the sign, hence, the use of the adjective “telling” above to describe the image. Take a look at the sign the campaign produced; it doesn’t just include repeal, it also promise to “replace”.  And focusing on that replacement is key for Romney to turn popular opposition to the president’s health care overhaul to his advantage — even if the Supreme Court overturns the president’s signature initiative.

Topping Jennifer Rubin’s list of the 10 things Romney “needs to do . . .in order to position himself for the final sprint to November” is developing . . .

. . . a health-care plan to replace Obamacare. Whatever the Supreme Court does, Romney should be the one with a constitutional, free-market-based health-care plan. Then he can put the spotlight on President Obama: Is he going to use the post-election “flexibility” to implement a single-payer plan?

Such a plan would help him better appeal to conservatives, showing that he advocates conservative reforms.  And it would help him appeal to independent voters as well who, even before the passage of Obamacare, believed our health care system needed reform, ifnot the overhaul Democrats favored.

Here, Rubin considers some of the ideas conservatives have been considering.  Romney will improve his standing with conservatives as well as with wavering independents if he spells out the kind of reforms he favors to replace Obamacare.

On Monday, the president said this about the Supreme Court review of Obamacare, “Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”  Emphasis added.

On March 21, 2010, the U.S. House  passed the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” by a vote of 219-212, with 34 Democrats joining 178 Republicans in opposition.  No Republicans vote for the bill.  (That’s a 7-vote margin.)

Fewer than ten months later, on January 19, 2011, the chamber, under new leadership, in large part because of opposition to said Act, acted to repeal the legislation by vote of 245-189, with three Democrats joined the sizable Republican majority.  (That’s a 56-vote margin.)

Would you agree with me that a 56-vote margin is a stronger majority than a 7-vote margin in a legislative body which hadn’t grown any larger between the two votes?

FROM THE COMMENTS: JP offers, “Also for great true ‘Strong Majorities’ see 0bama’s budgets. He got total agreement with no votes at all from BOTH parties. That’s a strong majority.”

UPDATE:  Seems I wasn’t the only one to make this observation.

(H/t Instapundit.)

. . . and they still voted for the bill.

Scalia on severability: Making us read this entire bill [i.e., Obamacare] would be cruel and unusual punishment.*

So, I guess that means he could still vote to uphold the constitutionality of the unpopular legislation.

——-

*Well, maybe that explains why most congressional Democrats failed to read the bill before voting in favor.  Such an action would violate the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Citing an article from from New York magazine, November 29, 2009, Jim Geraghty reminds us how after signing the “stimulus,” President Obama turned his attention to overhauling the nation’s health care system rather than focus on the economy, the top issue on America’s minds:

“Barack did the stimulus, and he thought he checked the box and moved on.” Of course, unemployment remained high, and the economy continued to struggle through this year. Obama moved on, of course, to Obamacare, phenomenallyunpopular legislation that may very well be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Read the whole thing.  Seems he was more interested in provided the fundamental changes he sought than in providing the changes for which Americans hoped.

More on this anon.

I’ve been listening and thought it would be cool to post this. Here’s the link to the oral & text from today’s events at the Supreme Court.

LISTEN NOW.

From what I’ve heard and read about today, it sounds like the case will be decided now on its merits; SCOTUS will not wait until “harm” occurs per the Anti-Injunction Act.

Also, here’s a nice summary from today’s proceedings by Phil Klein at the Examiner.

On the first day of oral arguments in the case challenging President Obama’s national health care law, justices seemed skeptical that the individual mandate should be considered a tax — one of the main consitutional defenses being offered for the law.

To be clear, today’s 90 minutes of oral arguments did not concern the underlying merits of the case, but whether an 1876 law called the Anti-Injunction Act bars the Court from ruling on the suit at this time. Under the Anti-Injunction Act, people cannot challenge a tax in court until after they have paid it. This would effectively punt the issue until at least 2015.

Read the whole thing… and listen to the arguments directly.  Very cool stuff.

UPDATE:  To me, a key question from Justice Sotomayor: “Assuming we find that this is not jurisdictional, what is the parade of horribles that you see occurring if we call this a mandatory claim processing rule?” 

She said it with quite a tone of saracasm and found herself agreeing with Justice Scalia & Alito on this point of the Anti-Injuction Act applying to Obamacare.  I’m very interested to hear her questions over the next two days.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

You know, when I think of these things, I really should just go ahead and post them right away…it’ll make me look more prescient and brilliant than simply linking:

This is something that’s been on my mind for quite a while, and Chris Wallace put great words to exactly what I’ve been thinking lately with regard to the Supreme Court’s ultimate decision on ObamaCare:

(sorry for the commercial, the discussion with Brit Hume starts at about 3:50)

The gist is that win or lose with SCOTUS, it’s a lose situation for Obama:

Either he loses his signature legislative victory because it’s unconstitutional, or the well-over 50% of Americans who hate it have no other recourse than to elect Republicans to both houses of Congress and the White House and Obama loses obviously in that case.

This, I think, lends itself to the point I was making earlier today that this is an opportunity for those of us who love Liberty and Independence to make crystal clear the choice we have before us this year: Do we continue down the path of governmental intrusion into and management of our lives, or do we assert ourselves and tell the dictators in Washington that, No thanks, we’ll take care of our own lives?

(Interestingly, Brit makes an excellent point that I’d not thought of: Basically, with our fiscal house in such disarray, ObamaCare cannot stand on its own failures anyway. That our debt and unfunded social liabilities are so massive that it doesn’t matter what happens with the Supreme Court or—it seems he’s suggesting—with repeal even through legislative remedies…that it will collapse simply because it cannot be afforded. Scary stuff, especially considering the likelihood that he’s wrong, and that the unaffordability of any mandate dating all the way back to the New Deal has never kept this country from burying itself in debt in order to continue to feed its appetite for mother’s milk from the teat of the government trough…if you’ll excuse my abusively mixed metaphors.)

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will begin hearing debates on four issues with respect to the law:

First, the breathtaking and unprecedented matter of Congress’s suggestion that it can force private citizens to purchase goods from private companies lest they face a fine. This has been the main focus over the past several months since they agreed to hear the case. This is quite symbolic, I think, of the mammoth gorge that exists between the views of the government espoused by the Left and the Right in America today: While Conservatives see the government expansion since the New Deal as being a break on innovation, liberty, and our Founding principles, statists on the Left insist that an expansive and ever-powerful central government is necessary in order to enforce the ‘general welfare’ of the Nation. How we as a People determine the degree to which our government can dictate our individual choices will surely inform what we become as a Country as the future unfolds.

Second is the question as to whether Congress’s expansion of Medicaid is unduly coercive. (a good primer on that here from CATO.)

Third is the question of severability, basically whether knocking down, say, the individual mandate, would render the entire law invalid, or if it would just ‘sever’ those parts that are objectionable and invalidate just that. (A bit on that, here.)

Finally is the Anti-Injunction Act, that some are arguing means the whole case is moot until someone is actually affected by the law, which hasn’t fully gone into effect yet. (Tell that to the would-be employees of small businesses who are not hiring because of the uncertainty this monstrosity has created. But anyway…)

Like many who read this blog, I’m cautiously hopeful the Supreme Court will agree with me that ObamaCare is patently unconstitutional and should be annulled post haste. But like many (much smarter than I) observers, I’m not convinced this will happen.

Either way, however, our remedy should not be the Supreme Court.

(more…)

Here we get AOL’s top story as we celebrate the 2nd anniversary of Obamacare:

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds reports how the president is celebrating his signature initiative:

WSJ: You Know What’s Missing From The Obama Healthcare Anniversary? Obama. Yeah, I’d keep a low profile on that one, too, if it were me. “With the law still unpopular with many Americans, the White House has concluded that it is virtually impossible to change negative public opinions, particularly if Mr. Obama is front and center, a senior administration official said.”

NB: Keep changing the title on this one.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has more on the anniversary the president is ignoring:

On Wednesday, The Hill reported that Barack Obama wouldn’t do anything to celebrate the two-year anniversary of ObamaCare, his signature legislative achievement.  That might have to do with the fact that a majority of voters wants it repealed, and even a plurality of Democrats (48%) want it rolled back in whole or in part.

This report sure suggests as much, Obama to intensify defense of health care reforms:

The White House is preparing a campaign to publicly defend President Obama’s health care reforms just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court weighs arguments on its constitutionality — a case that could redefine the scope of the 2012 election and mobilize voters on both sides.

Now, to be sure, this campaign is related to the coming arguments before the Supreme Court (shouldn’t they then be trying to sharpen their legal arguments rather than appeal to the public?), but said campaign will once again put the unpopular initiative into the spotlight.

Last time, Obamacare came to the forefront of our national discourse, Republicans won big in congressional elections:

It’s not easy to lose 63 seats in a House election. Before 2010, the last time it had been done was when Joe DiMaggio was still patrolling center field for the New York Yankees. It’s even harder to pull off such a feat when exit polling shows that Americans were inclined to blame the prior president (a member of the other party) for the poor economy. This raises a question that Democrats and the media have been avoiding for the past 16 months: Just how did the Democrats do it?

A new academic study says the answer can likely be reduced to one word: Obamacare. The study, which was conducted by scholars from Dartmouth and elsewhere, finds that “supporters of health care reform paid a significant price.”  (more…)

When I offered praise yesterday of Mitt Romney’s poise under fire, one of our readers suggested I had a man-crush on the GOP frontrunner.  Now, to be sure, I have a more favorable opinion of the former Massachusetts governor than I did at the outset of this campaign, I primarily lean in his direction because of his opposition.

Even as Romney has put forward a bolder, economic plan and more clearly articulate conservative principles, his Achilles’ heel, if you will, remains the health care legislation he signed when governor of Massachusetts.  Brit Hume said as much when reflecting on last night’s returns.  Byron York observed as much when talking to Ohio voters:

Why was Romney’s performance so underwhelming? Talks over the last couple of days with voters who chose Santorum suggested two reasons.  One, they still don’t trust Romney.  And two, they believe Obamacare will be a critical issue in the campaign, and they don’t think Romney, as author of the Romneycare health program in Massachusetts, will be able to effectively challenge Barack Obama over national health care.

Indeed, even after his big plans last week in Michigan and Arizona, Romney still lagged behind Santorum in Ohio polls, but but building momentum as the weekend approached.  That momentum was likely slowed by reports that the Republican encouraged the president to adopt the individual mandate.  (Over at the National Review, Mario Loyola disputes this assessment, noting that Romney was “was trying to fix the problems created by a scheme that was comparable to Obamacare, namely the ill-advised 1996 reforms.“)

Grace-Marie Turner shares York’s assessment, writing before Super Tuesday that “Even though Mitt Romney has had a string of primary wins, support for his presidential bid still is tepid among Republican voters nervous about Romneycare.”  (H/t: Laura Ingraham*)  She believes it would help the candidate to distinguish his plan from the president’s: (more…)

House Democrats, reports the Huffington Post, “have raised more than $1.1 million in the past week from their “War on Women” campaign“:

The DCCC launched its campaign on Feb. 23. Since then, Democrats have been using it to raise money, collect signatures on petitions and generally fire up their base ahead of elections. The campaign comes in response to the debate raging on Capitol Hill over women’s access to birth control that escalated with House Republicans hosting an almost entirely male hearing on the issue in mid-February.

Emphasis added.  No, the debate is not about women’s access to birth control, but about the federal government mandating what benefits private organizations can offer their employees.  At least we know what the Democrats’ rhetorical crusade is really about:  raising money and firing up their base.

John Hinderaker gets at the real problem with the mandate:

why on Earth is the government in the business of telling any employers, not just religious institutions, what benefits they must offer their employees? (more…)

Perhaps the greatest irony today about modern American liberals is that while they attack Republicans for wanting to limit their choices, they support policies which limit our choices.

They’ll lecture us about women’s health and the benefits of contraception, saying that individual women should be free to decided questions of sexual health (as well they should).  But, then they praise the federal government for dictating to an individual business owner what kind of health insurance he should provide — even if that provision violates the tenets of his faith.

The same government that call dictate to a Catholic business owner the policies he must adopt can also dictate to a lesbian physician the policies she should adopt in her clinic.

Should a lesbian physician concerned about the inadequacy of health care facilities tending to the particular concerns of women like herself be able to open up a clinic staffed only by women catering exclusively to lesbian, bisexual and transgender women?  Could the government, in the interest of “equality,” require that this clinic serve men?

Perhaps, under current law, it could.  And if it could, we should take away its power to deprive that woman of her freedom to establish such a clinic–and strip women of the freedom to seek care at a woman-only facility.

Just as this (hypothetical) lesbian physician should be free to establish an institution providing “woman-centered” health care so should a Catholic humanitarian be able to decide the conditions covered in the health insurance policy his institution offers its employees.

Some of our friends on the left seem bound and determined to turn the hullabaloo over the contraception mandate into a Republican War On Women.  But, there are quite a few pundits on the right (would it that there were more such politicians) who understand what’s really at stake.

The problem with the contraceptive mandate, writes the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner

is not the contraceptive part — it’s the mandate. The new health-care law requires every employer with 50 or more employees to provide their workers with health insurance. It also requires every American who doesn’t receive health insurance through work or a government program to buy insurance themselves or face a fine.

But simply providing or buying insurance is not enough to fulfill the mandate. The insurance must satisfy the government’s definition of what qualifies as proper insurance, including a long list of benefits that the government thinks you should have.

Read the whole thing.  The focus of this debate should be the simple question:  do we want the federal government to make our health care decisions for us — and to determine what kinds of health care plans we must own.

What if someone just wanted a plan to cover emergencies?  Well, under Obamacare, that’s just not possible.

Perhaps, if one of the Republican candidates laid the out in terms so clear, without getting distracted by a discussion on the merits (or demerits) of contraception, he would not only command the assent of his party, but turn the debate into a clear winner for conservatives.  And not just on this particular mandate.

According to the White House, what the Democrats dub “The Affordable Care Act will bring down costs, improve the quality of health care delivered to all Americans and expand coverage to 32 million Americans.” We on the right prefer to call that act, “Obamacare.”  For those like myself — and the roughly 14 million other Americans who purchase their own health insurance, it has made health care even less affordable.

Since the president signed the bill into law, the cost of  my monthly premium has increased by 47%.  Yes, that’s right, 47%.  And this a new plan I had purchased in order to cut my costs.

In the Orwellian world of the Obama Democrats, bringing down costs means increasing the price.

On the big issues of the day, Charles Krauthammer lays it out  the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to make sense of the subject.  And so it is today with his column on the contraception mandate.

Unlike others who have weighed in on the contraception kerfuffle, Krauthammer underscores what is truly at stake, not just the mandate itself, but also choice, yes, choice, the ability of insurance companies to craft a variety of plans and the freedom of the consumer to choose the one that’s best for him (or her).

It’s not just freedom of religion:

Under Obamacare, the state treats private insurers the way it does government-regulated monopolies and utilities. It determines everything of importance. Insurers, by definition, set premiums according to risk. Not anymore. The risk ratios (for age, gender, smoking, etc.) are decreed by Washington. This is nationalization in all but name. The insurer is turned into a middleman, subject to state control — and presidential whim.

Now, to be sure, Krauthammer also gets at the subterfuge of the compromise the president announced last week. As he puts it, “The president of the United States has just ordered private companies to give away for free a service that his own health and human services secretary has repeatedly called a major financial burden.”

Simply put, Obamacare empowers the government to determine what kind of plans insurance companies may offer and to define how these companies may factor risk ratios into a particular policy’s price.

Read the whole thing. It’s Krauthammer.

I don’t know that I’ll have time to say as much about this issue as I’d like.  Am traveling now for a family celebration.

A lot of conservative and libertarian pundits and bloggers have offered a lot of thoughtful commentary on the topic, starting (well, from my vantage point) with Peggy Noonan last week.  Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, the Anchoress, Cato @ Liberty and the Corner have been good sources.  (This, for example, is a particularly good post.  As is this*.)

I don’t know that I can add much to what they’ve been saying, but am troubled that our friends in the legacy media are calling this a social issue.  It’s not. It’s a freedom issue.

The basic question is should a private organization be able to determine the type of benefits it offers its employees.  A liberal administration is now trying to force religious organizations to pay for benefits supported by advocacy groups aligned with the Democrats.  By the same logic, a conservative administration could try to force private groups (say, universities) to offer (or not offer) benefits supported by advocacy groups aligned with Democrats.

It’s one more example of the government limiting our choices — which gets at the real problem of Obamacare, the federal government determining what a health insurance plan should include.  The more it mandates, the fewer options individuals have to choose from.

The fewer different kind of plans there are, the more uniform the price.

*ADDENDUM:  In said link over at Cato @ Liberty, Roger Pilon gets it: (more…)

Earlier this week, Michael Barone was one of a number of right-of-center political pundits to comment on “Jeffrey Toobin’s lengthy article on Supreme Court jurisprudence”, focusing on Justice Clarence Thomas and the judicial challenge to Obamacare.

It is possible, Barone writes

. . . to read Toobin’s article as a partisan hit job, echoing the demands of 74 Democratic House members that Justice Thomas recuse himself from sitting on a case challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare because of his wife’s involvement in the Tea Party movement.

Never mind that this is a standard neither Toobin nor the Democrats apply to other public officials with spouses active in public affairs — and that they’re not asking Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself because of her work in the Justice Department on the issue.

Nor did they ask for their colleague Barney Frank to recuse himself from the House Financial Services Committee (under its current or previous names) despite the fact that the Massachusetts Democrat helped his spouse secure a job at  Fannie Mae, a Government Sponsored Enterprise this committee oversees.

Barone also points out that “despite his obvious distaste for Thomas’ views, [Toobin] takes [the justice] seriously as a judicial thinker and pathfinder”:

In addition, as Toobin accurately reports, Thomas is the strongest originalist on the court, the justice who most consistently seeks to apply the provisions of the Constitution as they were originally understood. . . .

Toobin’s article represents the end of the fashionable left’s attempt to portray Thomas as an intellectual lightweight.

Read the whole thing.  One wonders if some on the left failed to discern the intellectual caliber of the jurist’s mind because of the color of his skin.

In today’s WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Stephen Moore quips “The Laffer report on the two presidents”, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama “is aptly entitled ‘The Odd Couple.’ In this case Reagan would be Felix, because he cleaned up the mess; and Mr. Obama is more like Oscar, who leaves a bigger mess behind.”

Seems Democrats believe the incumbent can repeat the feat of the most successful domestic policy president of the 20th century and win reelection despite middling polls during his third year in office. Problem is is that the Gipper’s poll numbers steadily increased in 1983 while in the corresponding year of his term, Obama’s have drifted downward.

Moore is onto something when he talks about Obama having left a bigger mess behind [than the one he "inherited"]. One reason House Republicans haven’t been able to devote more time on conservative reforms is that they have had to clean up messes the previous Congress left behind, such as its failure to pass a budget and to increase the debt ceiling high enough to accommodate the spending increases it did pass.

In addition to the messes the last Democratic House left the current Republican one, there are the messes Obama will leave to his successor, including notably two of the “big” pieces of legislation he signed, the health care overhaul and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, each increasing federal control over our economy. Not to mention all the new regulations administration appointees have foisted on the private sector, particularly those imposed by the EPA.

The next president is going to have to devote the better part of his first year in office just cleaning up the messes the incumbent is making today.

On Tuesday, I linked the closing question of Stephen Green’s insightful post on the Obama administration, but the beginning of that post also merits your attention (as does the middle).  He used Steve McCann’ thoughtful piece at American Thinker, linking the president’s behavior in the debt ceiling debate to his overall failure of leadership, as his jumping-off point.

McCann contends that

Barack Obama’s only interest in the debt ceiling debate was to raise the borrowing limit sufficiently to get by the next election, and as a cudgel to denigrate the Republicans. His concern was not for the American people and the impact of overwhelming national debt, nor an impending and inevitable credit downgrade. Rather, he was determined that raising the debt ceiling would not become an issue during the presidential campaign. . . .

The destruction wrought by the nearly $5.5 Trillion (more than a third of the total debt of a nation 222 years old) he will have added to the nation’s balance sheet by the end of his term was immaterial, thus no detailed plan was forthcoming from the White House, and no lie or accusation aimed at the opposition was too absurd to tell.

The Democrat has, McCann observes, “abdicated all responsibility to the Congress, in particular the House of Representatives, which has little choice but to assume a role they are not structured to do: lead the country as best they can until November 2012.”  Indeed, Obama been doing that since the dawn of his administration where he let congressional Democrats draft the “stimulus” as they would later write the health care overhaul.

Seems the election of a Republican House threw a wrench into his plans of governance.   (more…)