JAMES TARANTO: A Reprieve, but for Whom? The latest ObamaCare delay is self-serving.

The idea, as described by the Hill, is to minimize the number of consumers victimized before Election Day by President Obama’s you-can-keep-your-plan fraud. Although perhaps it would be more precisely accurate to say the idea is to minimize the number of consumers who know before Election Day that they’re victims of the fraud.

You’ll recall that last year, late in the summer and through September, insurance companies sent out a wave of letters informing policyholders that their plans would be canceled for failing to comply with ObamaCare’s many mandates. At first Obama and his defenders insisted these were all “substandard” policies and the government was doing people a favor by forcing their cancellation.

When that claim proved indefensible, Obama announced a partial reprieve: He “called on states and the insurance industry to allow people to keep their existing plans for an additional year.” The first batch of policies renewed under that moratorium expire Dec. 31, and insurers must give policyholders 90 days notice of cancellation.

Thus if the one-year reprieve expires, cancellation letters will go out at the same time they did last year–in the weeks leading up to Oct. 1, less than five weeks before the election. “I don’t see how they could have a bunch of these announcements going out in September,” a health-industry consultant tells the Hill. “Not when they’re trying to defend the Senate and keep their losses at a minimum in the House. This is not something to have out there right before the election.”

And so, according to the report, “as early as this week, according to two sources, the White House will announce a new directive allowing insurers to continue offering health plans that do not meet ObamaCare’s minimum coverage requirements”–presumably at least through 2015, though the story vaguely suggests the delay could be “several years.”

The political imperative is clear. If Republicans take a Senate majority–a strong possibility, given that Democrats are defending many seats on unfriendly terrain–then the Senate GOP, for the first time in Obama’s presidency, have the ability to force votes on legislation, and even to push some Republican bills through Congress.

True, the president has his veto pen (or is it a phone?), but he hasn’t used it since the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has seen to it that bills Obama opposes never make it to the floor of the Senate, which frees the president from the political cost of vetoing anything popular.

What’s more, vetoes can be overridden with two-thirds majorities in both congressional chambers. That raises the possibility of bipartisan legislation the president opposes–especially, though not only, changes in ObamaCare–becoming law over Obama’s objections.

Well, to be fair, everything they do is self-serving.