Mitt Romney is an idiot or, even worse, is pretending to be one. His tantrum of a response on Thursday to the Supreme Court's health-care decision was pure playground: As president I will own the ball, and the game will be played by rules that leave me a winner.
That game has already been called in a decision written by the top-ranking conservative jurist, and shorn of the constitutional objection; Barack Obama's health-care plan now will be judged by its practical outcomes. Romney's promise that "I will act to repeal Obamacare" from "my first day as president of the United States" is a prescription of destructive gridlock for a program already well under way.
By immediately committing to reverse a health-care reform based on the very program he implemented as governor of Massachusetts, Romney has gone to war with himself. Obviously, neither he nor his advisers has yet grasped that the decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts has changed the terms of the debate.
The issue is no longer one of states' rights. That would have been the case if the court had relied on the Constitution's commerce clause, leaving Romney to argue that it was legal for his state to have required a mandate but is illegal for the feds to do so. However, the court decision, based as it is on the right of the government to raise taxes to pay for a public need, makes the states' rights claim irrelevant.
The issue faced by the court was the same on the federal level as it was on the state level; if the public, through its government, must ultimately bear the cost of caring for the uninsured -- as would be so in any society possessed of even a modicum of shared social responsibility -- then it can vote to levy taxes to finance that effort.
Why did Massachusetts under Romneycare have a right to tax to pay for mandated health care but the federal government would have no such right? All the Obama campaign needs to do is play that video clip from April 12, 2006, when Romney signed into law a Massachusetts mandate, justifying his tax penalty on those who failed to comply by saying it would help "hundreds of thousands of people ... have healthier and happier lives." President Obama could claim correctly that he added 30 million Americans, not blessed to be living in Massachusetts, to the healthy and happy category.Clearly the Romney campaign staff was not prepared for what it must now view as Justice Roberts' betrayal. Based on the oral proceedings of the court, Romney's aides felt assured that Justice Anthony Kennedy would join his four conservative colleagues in voting to reverse the law.
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