Ugly numbers for one of the ugliest laws a partisan Congress has ever passed without bothering to read first:
Last month’s hearings on the constitutionality of health care reform didn’t help its popularity: Public support for Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislation has hit a new low in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, with criticism of the individual mandate as high as ever.
Half the public, moreover, thinks the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the legislation on the basis of the justices’ partisan political views rather than the law. Fewer, 40 percent, think impartial legal analysis will carry the day, with the rest unsure.
Maybe the president’s attack on SCOTUS has had an effect. Or maybe the public is aware that the liberals on the court intend to vote as partisans. Justice Elena Kagan, who helped draft the defense of ObamaCare when she worked for Obama, certainly will. Reuters positively gushed about Kagan “taking on the conservative, five-man majority controlling” SCOTUS last week. But according to the poll, it’s Democrats who expect the justices to go political. Another case of projection from the left, obviously.
Fifty-three percent of Americans now oppose the law overall, while just 39 percent support it – the latter the lowest in more than a dozen ABC/Post polls since August 2009. “Strong” critics, at 40 percent, outnumber strong supporters by nearly a 2-1 margin in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates.
Two-thirds continue to say the high court should throw out either the entire law (38 percent) or at least the part that requires most individuals to obtain coverage (29 percent) or face a penalty; just a quarter want the court to uphold the law as is. Those numbers, like views on the law overall, are essentially unchanged from a month ago.
Update: Half of all Democrats (?) want to see ObamaCare junked?
[A] poll just conducted for IBD by TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence found that only 22% said they wanted the justices to uphold the entire law, while 37% said strike down the whole thing and 30% said to strike down only the law’s individual mandate to buy health insurance. Another 10% were unsure.
Strikingly, the same poll found that while 39% of Democrats wanted the law upheld, 38% wanted the mandate struck down and another 12% wanted the whole thing thrown out. In other words, 50% want part or all of the law tossed. Even taking into account that some of those may be liberals who dislike ObamaCare because it isn’t more expansive, it’s a striking rejection of the president’s main accomplishment by his own party.
We should also take into account the fact that many Democrats have never bought into the leftist radicalism that infests the top of their party. These Democrats are moderate to conservative but vote D because their parents and grandparents did. ObamaCare may yet awaken them to the reality that today’s Democratic Party is very much not their daddy’s Democratic Party.
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