If the Supreme Court overthrows the individual mandate, doesn’t Mitt Romney say “I told you so” and emerge as the big political winner?
All along he’s been arguing that only states have mandate power, and that the federal government under the commerce clause, or any other law, is guilty of massive regulatory overreach with Obamacare.
While fending off criticism from Rick Santorum and others about the Massachusetts mandate, Romney has always said it was a state issue, not a federal one. And if the Supreme Court agrees, it would have to give the former governor a leg up in credibility with Republicans and the general public.
President Obama, meanwhile, would emerge as a big political loser. Obamacare was the central signature domestic economic plan for his administration. What else does he have to show for nearly three and a half years in office? An $800 billion stimulus plan that didn’t work? A tax on rich people? An assault on oil and gas companies?
Besides Obamacare, what can the president really point to as an accomplishment?
The other big winners in the event the mandate is overturned are business and the economy. Talk to almost any CEO and they’ll tell you that the tax-, regulatory-, and insurance-cost threats from Obamacare have stopped them from hiring. Or, if they have made new hires recently, they’ve gone a lot slower than would have been the case without Obamacare. Remember how many companies asked for Obamacare waivers this past year. That shows their distaste for the legislation.
Of course, there’s still the huge tax cliff coming early next year, when virtually the entire tax code is upended. But Obamacare, with all its tentacles, has been a huge growth impediment. The Supreme Court could remove that jobs barrier, not to speak of the potential fiscal bankruptcy suffered from the gigantic costs of new Obamacare entitlements.
Mitt Romney’s job in a post-Obamacare world is to show voters what his alternative would be. In a recent op-ed in USA Today, he begins to set this out: tax benefits for individuals purchasing insurance outside their workplace; more competition and consumer choice for insurance plans; medical-malpractice reform; interstate insurance options; and state-determined insurance protection for those with preexisting illnesses. All this is a good start. Rather than a government-run health-care reform, Romney is pushing a market-run reform, which has long been a Republican idea.
So we’ll see in a couple of months how the Supremes decide the Obamacare case. But Romney, the likely GOP nominee, is well positioned to take advantage of a scenario where the Obamacare federal takeover is rejected.
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