Conservative defenders of Mitt Romney argue that however similar his Massachusetts health care plan may have been to President Obama’s national health care law, he’s an acceptable candidate because he’s called for the repeal of the national law. The problem is, based on what we know about him, there’s no reason to accept Romney’s reassurances that he’d actually follow through as president.
Here’s what we know. During his one time as an elected politician, Romney’s signature achievement was the passage of a health care law that was the forerunner to Obamacare. Both plans: expand Medicaid, force individuals to obtain government-approved insurance coverage or pay a penalty, and provide government subsidies to individuals to purchase government-designed insurance policies on government-run exchanges.
During his presidential campaign, Romney has said he supports the repeal of the law and would issue an executive order to waive Obamacare for 50 states. That’s a fine talking point for a debate answer, but it doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. As president, Romney could direct his administration not to implement some regulatory aspects of the law, but a future Democratic president could quickly reinstate them. Furthermore, he couldn’t, through executive order, eliminate most of the major spending provisions in the law. For that to happen, we’d need to see a repeal bill passed through both chambers of Congress. Given the unlikelihood that Republicans would gain a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, this would have to be done through the reconciliation process. Though some people have argued to me that a GOP Congress would obviously pass a repeal of Obamacare and Romney would be forced to sign it, there’s no reason to believe that Congressional leaders would pursue a sure to be acrimonious reconciliation process unless the president were willing to stake political capital on it. So a President Romney couldn’t passively sit back and wait for a repeal bill to appear on his desk, he’d have to show courageous presidential leadership, pounding the table on the issue for months. And it won’t be just any months, but he’ll have to stake the crucial early months of his presidency on it after taking office in January 2013, because the major provisions start in 2014, and it will be harder to unwind by then. So this raises the question of whether I think Romney has the resolve to see something like this through, to which I’d respond: are you kidding me?
Some of Romney’s many policy reversals have been overlooked in this campaign as old news, so I’ll just provide a brief refresher. Romney ran for statewide office in the Massachusetts twice, in 1994 and 2002, as a pro-choice candidate, only to become publicly pro-life in 2005, just as he was gearing up to seek the GOP presidential nomination instead of seeking a second term as governor of the liberal state. During the 2008 campaign he attacked various opponents for being for gun control, amnesty and campaign finance reform. Yet at earlier points in his career, Romney supported the federal “assault weapons” ban (and signed a state ban as governor in 2004), called the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform “reasonable” and “quite different from amnesty” and supported campaign finance reform measures far more draconian than anything in McCain-Feingold. During this campaign, he’s spent the last few weeks attacking his opponent Texas Gov. Rick Perry for criticizing Social Security too harshly, because he says it’s politically damaging to do so.
Romney, in short, has displayed zero political courage during his career. He has held opposite positions on nearly every issue, with one obvious exception. He still hasn’t disavowed the health care law he designed, campaigned for, and signed with a smiling Ted Kennedy at his side. And it happens to be the forerunner to Obamacare. There’s no reason to believe as cautious and calculating of a figure as Mitt Romney would stake the crucial first months of his presidency getting into a bruising political battle to repeal a law, when he still clings to its underlying policy ideas.
And remember, New Deal era programs weren’t firmly enshrined in this country by Democrats, but becuase Republicans, once in power, stopped making the case against them and their leader, President Eisenhower, did nothing to unravel them. Thus, the damage that a President Romney could do to the cause of limited government simply by inaction on Obamacare is incalculable.
