Every Presidental election is now about an Obamacare Waiver

Ali Akbar: “…And if this law passes we’ll repeal it.”

DaT­e­chGuy: “No we won’t!”

Boston: Jan­u­ary 17^th 2010

OK peo­ple on the left, you wanted Oba­macare to be upheld it has been. Your huge tax increase on the Amer­i­can peo­ple (that you pre­tended was not) is legal.

To my friends on the right, I don’t care what the dis­sents were, they don’t mat­ter. Nor am I going to pre­tend that we are going to be able to repeal it, we need 60 votes in the sen­ate to do so and that just isn’t going to hap­pen for a while, so let me tell you what IS going to happen.

1. Mitt Rom­ney just won in 2012.

The Obama brand was in trou­ble already but there was some hes­i­ta­tion of those in the base to embrace him. There is absolutely noth­ing that will ener­gize that base more than this issue. This is not going to be close.

2. Every elec­tion is now about Obamacare

The pres­i­dent has been giv­ing indi­vid­ual orga­ni­za­tion wavers. Mitt Rom­ney has already said he will give the entire coun­try a waiver to Oba­macare. This means that in 2016 the demo­c­rat can­di­date will have to revoke that waiver in order to imple­ment it.

So every four years the ques­tion will be before the Amer­i­can Peo­ple: “Do you want Oba­macare imple­mented or not?”, until it is imple­mented or repealed.

Democ­rats this is the polit­i­cal ground you wanted, I hope you enjoy it.

Update: added sen­tence con­cern­ing: “Do you want Oba­macare imple­mented or not?”

Update 2: If Oba­macare is a tax then every demo­c­rat who runs promis­ing to remove a Oba­macare waiver is promis­ing to increase taxes. It’s all up to us as Glenn Reynolds put it:

The Supreme Court has refused to save us from our­selves. The rem­edy now will have to be political.

Update 3: Remem­ber when we were told that this wasn’t a tax?

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Louie Gohmert has a suc­cinct sum­mary of the Court’s deci­sion today. The Supreme Court told us today “of course they are liars. You should have known they were liars.

Update 4: if you won’t believe me will you believe Ann Alt­house?

I have said repeat­edly that Obama would be worse off if Oba­macare were upheld, but what I’m really see­ing is how bad it is for him with the man­date declared a tax.

Remem­ber the Democ­rats got the statute passed by insist­ing it was not a tax. Now, we learn it is only con­sti­tu­tional because it is a tax. That’s got to hurt politically.

Update 5: If this is true then it is a national dis­grace

Scalia’s dis­sent, at least on first quick perusal, reads like it was orig­i­nally writ­ten as a major­ity opin­ion (in par­tic­u­lar, he con­sis­tently refers to Jus­tice Ginsburg’s opin­ion as “The Dis­sent”). Back in May, there were rumors float­ing around rel­e­vant legal cir­cles that a key vote was tak­ing place, and that Roberts was feel­ing tremen­dous pres­sure from uniden­ti­fied cir­cles to vote to uphold the man­date. Did Roberts orig­i­nally vote to inval­i­date the man­date on com­merce clause grounds, and to inval­i­date the Med­ic­aid expan­sion, and then decide later to accept the tax argu­ment and essen­tially rewrite the Med­ic­aid expan­sion (which, as I noted, cit­ing Jonathan Cohn, was the sleeper issue in this case) to pre­serve it? If so, was he respond­ing to the heat from Pres­i­dent Obama and oth­ers, pre­emp­tively threat­en­ing to dele­git­imize the Court if it inval­i­dated the ACA?

Update 6: Inter­est­ing point at Red­state via newsalert and Insty

With John Roberts’ opin­ion, the repeal fight takes place on GOP turf, not Demo­c­rat turf. The all or noth­ing repeal has always been bet­ter ground for the GOP and now John Roberts has forced every­one onto that ground. Oh, and as I men­tioned ear­lier, because John Roberts con­cluded it was a tax, the Democ­rats can­not fil­i­buster its repeal because of the same rec­on­cil­i­a­tion pro­ce­dure the Democ­rats used to pass it.

If that is cor­rect it changes the equation

Update 7: The suck­ers are falling for it:

Imme­di­ately after the Supreme Court deci­sion, the Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­a­to­r­ial Cam­paign Com­mit­tee (DSCC) sent out a peti­tion that said, “Stand Up for Obamacare!”

“Sign here right now and tell Pres­i­dent Obama that you have his back and show your sup­port for Oba­macare,” the peti­tion urged.

Now that the DSCC has offi­cially taken own­er­ship of the “Oba­macare” label, it will be inter­est­ing to see how that impacts Democ­rats, such as Missouri’s Claire McCaskill and Montana’s Jon Tester, who are in extremely tough Sen­ate reelec­tion bat­tles in their respec­tive states.

Please PLEASE democ­rats embrace Oba­macare before this election.

Update 8: NRO gets it

First, those who dis­like the man­date — which includes a major­ity of U.S. vot­ers — will now have no recourse but to vote for Mitt Rom­ney to repeal it. Sec­ond, the only way the admin­is­tra­tion pre­vailed was to have Obama’s main leg­isla­tive accom­plish­ment rede­fined as one of the largest middle-​class tax increases in the his­tory of the country.

Does that really sound like a good polit­i­cal out­come to you?

Sounds like a good polit­i­cal out­come to me.

Update 9: Hey remem­ber the Catholic Church’s protests on reli­gious lib­erty, lets not for­get that thanks to today’s rul­ing they will con­tinue through elec­tion day.

Update 10: The Anchoress:

Well, as Glenn points out a tax repeal can’t be fil­i­bus­tered. Inter­est­ing times ahead. Is it pos­si­ble that Roberts, con­cerned by threats from the left that they would de-​legitimize the court if it struck down Oba­macare, rea­soned as he did to both give the GOP a work­able means of repeal­ing the thing through leg­is­la­tion while also utterly defang­ing those threats? After all, if you look at the peo­ple scream­ing about the court yes­ter­day, they’re all purring like kit­tens on twit­ter, and call­ing SCO­TUS “hum­ble” and “judi­cious.” There’s no more talk of “par­ti­san, activist judges” today.

Are the Dems and the press going to wake up in the mid­dle of the night, think about that and cringe?

That’s up to the voters.

Update 11: Rox­eanne De Luca: John Roberts, I love you, you blue-​eyed, dia­bol­i­cal hot­tie
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