Here’s something remarkable: The New Yorker pre-blasting President Obama in case the government loses its Obamacare case before the Supreme Court in King v. Burwell.
The gist of this piece, written by Jeffrey Toobin, is that, if Obama and his allies lose the Burwell case (which is far from certain), he can point fingers and blame his adversaries all he wants … but the whole debacle will be his to own.
Not only will Obama have to own such a loss, but he’ll have to live with the political consequences, Toobin argues in his piece — appropriately titled “Obama’s game of chicken with the Supreme Court” — because the White House made a political decision not to have a back-up plan in place, should the Affordable Care Act suddenly be struck down.
From the article:
As Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, put it recently, “I don’t think they [Obamacare’s opponents] will [win the case]. If they do, that’s a problem that the Republicans have.”
No, it’s not. If the Obama Administration loses in the Supreme Court, the political pain will fall almost exclusively on the President and his Party. To paraphrase Colin Powell and the Pottery Barn rule, President Obama will have broken health care, so he owns it. To the vast mass of Americans who follow politics casually or not at all, Obamacare and the American system of health care have become virtually synonymous. This may not be exactly right or fair, but it’s a reasonable perception on the part of most people. The scope of the Affordable Care Act is so vast, and its effects so pervasive, that there is scarcely a corner of health care, especially with regard to insurance, that is unaffected by it. So if millions lose insurance, they will hold it against Obamacare, and against Obama. Blaming the President in these circumstances may be unfair, but it’s the way American politics works.
As you can see, Toobin doesn’t write with mirth about the possible fallout for President Obama — but he writes realistically nonetheless.
“The headlines [if Obama loses] will read, correctly, ‘Court rules against Obamacare,’ and this will be all that matters,” Toobin predicts. “… Watch for references to a ‘failed Presidency.’ There’ll be plenty of them.
“Understandably, perhaps, the Administration has courted this kind of reaction… In testimony before Congress and elsewhere, Sylvia Burwell, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (and the defendant in the case), said that the Administration has no contingency plan for an adverse ruling in the Supreme Court. But playing chicken with the Justices only works if it works. If the Supreme Court strikes down the subsidies, the Administration will also have to answer for why it didn’t prepare for this possibility.”
That would be interesting, since everyone on both sides of the argument already knows why Obama hasn’t prepared “for this possibility.” It’s right there in Toobin’s column: the president has played chicken with the Obamacare suit, in the hope that the stakes will remain too high for the Supreme Court to do anything but declare victory against any and all challenges to the Affordable Care Act.
“If the Supreme Court rules against him, the President can blame the Justices or the Republicans or anyone he likes,” concludes Toobin, “and he may even be correct. But the buck will stop with him.”
The post Even the left is ready to blame Obama if Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act appeared first on Personal Liberty.
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