1. Make no mistake: Obamacare is in trouble. For the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to go fully into effect, two things need to happen. First, the Democrats need to hold the presidency and the Senate in 2012. According to Keith Hennessey, Republicans can repeal most of Obamacare via reconciliation — irony alert! — meaning that the Dems have to keep their losses to three or fewer in the Senate. Second, they need the law to be upheld by the Supreme Court. These two events are independent of each other, which enables us to get a sense of the probability that the law will ultimately be implemented (largely as it’s currently structured).
Regarding the 2012 election, right now, InTrade has Obama’s reelection trading around 60, which seems to me to be a pretty reasonable assessment. Let’s also assume that as goes the presidency, so goes the whole Congress. Again, pretty reasonable.
What about the chances that Obamacare gets overturned by the Supreme Court? In a November conversation with ReasonTV, University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein noted the cleverness of the constitutional challenge, which is primarily directed against the individual mandate. First, it attacks Obamacare without threatening existing, and broadly popular, social welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security. The Supreme Court could strike down Obamacare without striking down any other major piece of social welfare legislation. Second, it puts the government on the defensive, as it has to explain how accepting the individual mandate does not result in an unlimited grant of power to the Congress. As Epstein puts it: “If you can force us to buy $2,000 because there’s a coordination problem and a free rider problem, why can’t you force us to brush our teeth three times a day, to have certain kinds of balanced diets, do exercise – and it turns out you get yourself a totalitarian state.” This is a very serious Commerce Clause argument, which Judge Vinson accepted in his recent ruling on Obamacare.
Back in November, Epstein was willing to give the challenge a 20-25 percent success rate, but he also suggested that the odds would increase over time as the unpopularity of the plan becomes more evident. Recently, in an interview with Peter Robinson, Epstein said that the battle in the courts would be a “horse race.” So, let’s assume that there’s now a 25 percent chance Obamacare gets overturned by the Court, and thus a 75 percent chance that it’s affirmed.
That gives us a simple probability estimate of the odds that the bill actually gets implemented when it’s all said and done: 60 percent X 75 percent = 45 percent. In other words, if you take InTrade and Epstein as accurate, at this point you’d have to conclude that the odds of implementation are about the same as, if not a little worse than, the odds of non-implementation.
The lesson in all this? It’s simply not enough to get a big bill passed. You have to build a broad consensus in support of the proposition that the law is beneficial and constitutional. A one-off, outsized majority full of Northern, liberal Democrats is insufficient to force major changes on a policy area as important as health care.
2. Mitt Will Go To Iowa. An interesting exchange between Mitt Romney and Hugh Hewitt on the former’s political strategy “should” he decide to run:
Romney: Well, if I decide to run, I’ll be planning on running nationwide. And certainly, the early states will be places where we concentrate most of our attention. So it’s nice for people who are from the outside of a campaign to offer their suggestions. But frankly, if I get in this, I’m not going to be doing so much of a political calculus as I am a calculus of what message needs to be heard by the American people, and how can I deliver it best. And that would surely take me to Iowa as well as the other early states, and probably, ultimately, quite a few of our states.
First off, Romney has to play in Iowa. He doesn’t necessarily have to win it (more on that in a moment), but if he wants to be the national party’s nominee, he has to compete in every contest in the nation. It’s just that simple.
But having Pawlenty and Thune in the race could very well help Romney. As Hewitt suggests, regional affect would probably boost their numbers in Iowa (just as happened with Tom Harkin on the Democratic side back in 1992), reduce the importance of the caucus, and thus the threat it presents to the stature of the Romney candidacy. Personally, I think the more candidates in the field, the better positioned Romney would be. If you get Thune, Pawlenty, and Jim DeMint in — Romney could probably get to Super Tuesday with his credibility fully intact by winning just the New Hampshire primary.
There’s no doubt that Romney absolutely, positively must win New Hampshire this time around. He didn’t lose 2008 in Iowa. He lost it in New Hampshire. Historically, it’s a pretty rare occurrence that a single candidate in an open field wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, but the eventual nominee has always carried one or the other. For Mitt, that makes the Granite State a must win in 2012.
3. Pataki To Run? Well, this is interesting:
Of course, this has ignited all sorts of presidential speculation, and his spokesman acknowledges that his boss is “taking a look at it.”
The Hill‘s Christian Heinze lists several good reasons to believe Pataki is looking at this, including comments from Ed Koch, former New York GOP chair Bill Powers, and National Republican Senatorial Committee chair John Cornyn.
I’m suddenly reminded of that old Byrds/Dylan tune “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” Like I said earlier in the week, there’s just no real angle for a Rockefeller-style Republican from New York — not in an age when the party is dominated by a Southern/Western base. In 1968, George Romney was the candidate that Rockefeller backed initially, before finally tossing in against Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; in 2012, George’s son, Mitt, will run claiming to be the heir to Ronald Reagan. That tells you everything you need to know about the modern GOP.
