If the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare later this month,
the ruling will be based on the inability of five or more justices
to reconcile the law's individual mandate with the Constitution.
These justices will have reached the conclusion that the enumerated
powers of the federal government do not include the authority to
force individuals to buy health insurance so that Congress can then
regulate that activity via the interstate commerce clause. Such a
decision will be incredibly humiliating for the President, but it
will doubtless provide a certain amount of schadenfreude to his
Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton, you will recall, was subjected
to relentless attacks by Obama during the 2008 Democrat primaries
because her plan to reform health care included such a mandate.
In those long-forgotten primary battles, Obama repeatedly touted his opposition to an individual mandate as one of the major distinctions between his "reform" plan and that of his main rival for the nomination. During the 2008 Democrat debates he routinely upbraided Clinton for advocating a policy that he said was fundamentally unfair: "[T]he reason people don't have health insurance isn't because they don't want it, it's because they can't afford it." To drive home his point, he frequently employed the following mordant analogy: "If a mandate was the solution, we can try to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house." Such heresy produced denunciations from a variety of progressives, including Paul Krugman, who accused Obama of "echoing right-wing talking points."
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/04/the-supreme-irony-of-obamacare
In those long-forgotten primary battles, Obama repeatedly touted his opposition to an individual mandate as one of the major distinctions between his "reform" plan and that of his main rival for the nomination. During the 2008 Democrat debates he routinely upbraided Clinton for advocating a policy that he said was fundamentally unfair: "[T]he reason people don't have health insurance isn't because they don't want it, it's because they can't afford it." To drive home his point, he frequently employed the following mordant analogy: "If a mandate was the solution, we can try to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house." Such heresy produced denunciations from a variety of progressives, including Paul Krugman, who accused Obama of "echoing right-wing talking points."
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/04/the-supreme-irony-of-obamacare
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