Pretzel Logic

Jonathan Chait looks at the strategic logic that the Republicans have embraced in their fight against HCR.

The most amusing spectacle of the health care debate has been watching Republicans rally with the utmost earnestness around principles that literally nobody within their party had ever considered before the health care debate. So, we've seen them rail against the use of budget reconciliation, previously a procedure they'd employed for major tax cuts, as something akin to dictatorship. They've embraced the notion that passing major legislation that commands less than fifty percent in the polls is an abrogation of democracy, an idea none of them considered when they passed a Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003 that lacked plurality support.
 
The most comical iteration of this phenomenon has to be the ongoing attempts by Republicans to overturn health care reform in court on the grounds that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. First of all, as Paul Campos notes, this would be a wild exercise in judicial activism,  opposition to which is the alleged lodestar of conservative judicial philosophy. And second, until very recently, Republicans considered the individual mandate not only Constitutional but utterly uncontroversial. Last year, Republican Senators Robert Bennett, Lindsey Graham, Mike Crapo, Judd Gregg and Lamar Alexander all co-sponsored a health care bill that included an individual mandate. Olympia Snowe voted for a Senate Finance Committee health care bill that included an individual mandate before subsequently voting with her entire party to call the mandate unconstitutional. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, currently suing to overturn the individual mandate, once supported a mandate that parents purchase insurance for their children.