Obamacare on Trial: Guilty as charged?

by: Zappatero

Mon Mar 26, 2012 at 11:42:52 AM MST

The [Affordable Care Act] is a sprawling revision of the health care system meant to provide coverage to tens of millions of previously uninsured Americans by imposing new requirements on states, employers and insurance companies and, through what has been called the individual mandate, by requiring most Americans to obtain insurance or pay a penalty.

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Challengers of the law will face President Obama's Solicitor General on Tuesday for the main event, the argument over whether the requirement to obtain insurance was authorized by the Constitution as a regulation of interstate commerce or by the power to levy taxes. The administration says the health care law is well within the powers granted by the Constitution, while the challengers say it plainly exceeds what the federal government may do.

Dahlia Lithwik in Slate breaks down the bottom line (h/t nyceve):

That brings me full circle to the court's five conservatives. Is it possible that they are sufficiently ideological and political that the grim joy of sticking it to the president and the Congress will lead them to strike down the law? Of course. But it is also possible that the two new justices, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, cut their teeth on Ed Meese's conservatism instead.

They were raised on Reagan-era opposition to abortion and affirmative action, to the perceived indignities of the Voting Rights Act, and objections to the wall erected between church and state. Those are the fights to which these men dedicated themselves as young lawyers.

I'm 99% sure Senator Michael Bennet lied when he said he'd be willing to lose his job over the Public Option, something that never made it into the minimally-implemented law that Conservatives hate so much. Of course, he did nothing to improve the law and demurred on all his Senatorial privileges. Things like Bennet's lies, Republicans' full-frontal assault, and Democrats' overall failure to lead on the issue are among the reasons we have come to this point. AmericaBlog describes the folly with Democrats' lame politics on this and other issues. Mean old bloggers have been sounding the alarm for years:

It was foolish of Democrats not to embrace health care reform, and wear it as a badge of honor, from the beginning. In the same way Democrats didn't embrace the stimulus, they did the same (or didn't do the same) on HCR. And all the while, the Republicans simply lied in a vacuum, and just like with the stimulus the public believed the lie. Which is usually what happens when only one side shows up to a debate.

What's most disturbing to me is how several of us saw this coming. We saw how Democrats were refusing to fight back against GOP lies on issue after issue, and we warned that it would come back to haunt us. And it has. The Republicans should be getting the blame for the poor economy, they were the ones who demanded a smaller stimulus. From day one the President should have warned that growth would be less because of the GOP.

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If you don't fight back from day one, if you don't keep fighting the lies, the lies stick.

Democrats gave Republicans a giant "socialism" stick with which to beat Democrats over the head for almost the entire four years of President Obama's term. They achieved an unprecedented series of failures with this law and the surrounding politics and rhetoric: there is no Public Option, the full law won't take effect for another few years, people don't understand the law due to its staggered implementation and Democrats' lackluster support, they don't like the law due to Republicans' non-stop, unanswered lies, and Republicans have used it as a launching board for attack after attack against the president and the chance for any meaningful tune-up of our highly profitable yet highly wasteful health care system.

So I say this: let the Supes throw out Obamacare.

Let voters see what an activist court looks like. Let the false bipartisanship that's so beloved within the Beltway die its long overdue death.  Let Democrats finally put up a truly progressive health care restructuring bill with their full support and the true health and well-being of Americans as its first priority.

Republicans charged Obamacare would ruin our economy and was a government takeover of health care. None of it happened. Obamacare is not guilty as charged. But throwing it out might be the best result yet of the generational fight between Democrats and Republicans and their mutually exclusive views of government.