Democrats have become interesting creatures in the age of Obama. The other day I was on a local radio show, the topic was Obama’s triumphal speech on reaching the phony 7 million sign-up target, and an Obamacare supporting Democrat caller attempted to pull a version of “It’s the law!” on me. He tried to take me down a path of defending the law that began “Wasn’t this decided by the Supreme Court?”
“So was Dred Scott. What’s your point?” was my response.
The Supreme Court is composed of fallible humans and makes awful decisions with almost as smooth a routine as it makes good decisions. What even constitutes a good or bad decision is in the eye of the beholder. Wearing a robe does not make the justices any closer to divinity than the rest of us, and it does not lift them above criticism. Right now, Democrats who claim “It’s the law!” to bully Obamacare critics are the first ones to whine and howl at how awful the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions are. And they admit no contradiction between the two positions. They can’t even look up “hypocrite” on Google.
Despite “It’s the law!”, former Obama adviser Robert Gibbs, for one, thinks the Obamacare law will be gutted of one of its mandates.
Gibbs delivered a speech at the 2014 Benefits Selling Expo in Colorado Springs, CO this week.
“I don’t think the employer mandate will go into effect,” Gibbs told the audience. “It’s a small part of the law. I think it will be one of the first things to go.”
The employer mandate is not a small part of the Obamacare law at all. While the number of Americans who get their health coverage from their employer is on a slight decline, according to Gallup it was still at nearly 45% as of 2011. The individual slice of the market is far smaller. The employer mandate is one of Obamacare’s funding mechanisms.
The employer mandate has already been delayed twice, both times to push it back past elections to benefit Democrats. “It’s the law!” clearly didn’t matter more than “We might lose the next election!”
But the fact remains, the employer mandate is part of that law that Democrats claim is sacrosanct when Republicans criticize it, before Democrats re-write it on the fly to protect themselves.
If the employer mandate can be jettisoned, the entire law can be jettisoned. And it should be.
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