Health Insurance Decision Reminder

I believe there's an excellent chance the health insurance act will be shot down, either in significant part, or in its entirety. If that does happen, President Obama and the Democrats will attack conservative Attorneys General, conservatives in Congress, and conservatives in the Supreme Court. They will leverage this into even more divisiveness. Obama has been pitting Us vs. Them since his inaugural address, and he's not going to stop now.

Just remember one thing, though: many of us, including myself, said the mandate was obviously unconstitutional before the bill was passed by either house of Congress. If I believed that, and many other conservatives believed that, then surely Obama and the Democrats knew it was very possible -- if not likely -- that five Supreme Court justices would believe that.

But they rammed this through Congress anyway, marking the first time since Reconstruction that major social program changes became law with the backing of only one political party, against what almost all polls say was against the will of a majority of Americans. This was obviously going to be challenged in court, where we all knew there was a good chance it would get overturned.

And Obama himself said very clearly that an individual mandate was a problem -- because it forced everyone to buy insurance -- when he was running for the Democratic nomination back in 2008 against other top candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, who both favored a mandate.

So they spent over a year of deliberations in Congress to get an unpopular, single-party policy into law, that Obama himself had opposed just a year earlier, that they knew had a good chance of being overturned by the Supreme Court, and that didn't have any clear way to accomplish severability.

They literally, knowingly, and intentionally set themselves up for this. I don't know if it was some bizarre Machiavellian scheme to get overturned and cast blame elsewhere, or if it was just a vain hope they could pull it off, against the odds. But they knew a very likely outcome was a challenge and overturn. And yet they'll still have the gall to blame conservatives and Republicans. Harry Reid said just yesterday that the Supreme Court knocking down some of the Arizona immigration law "proves" that the law was unconstitutional. Will he be singing the same song after his health insurance act is ruled unconstitutional?

If you're angry about not getting more government control over health insurance, please do blame conservatives and Republicans. I'll gladly accept some of that blame, because I believe we should have less government control over health insurance, because I believe this is better for our individual freedom, and that it will result in lower costs for everyone.

But if you're angry at all the wasted time and energy to pass a law that only got overturned, setting us back to Square One -- but behind four years from where we were before -- the blame lies with the Democrats, not with the people who stood up against an unconstitutional law and got it overturned.