health ruling thursday

[Riot]

As Ezra Klein says:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...w2V_story.html

But permission structures aren’t just for elections. Over the past two years, the Republican Party has slowly been building a permission structure for the five Republicans on the Supreme Court to feel comfortable doing something nobody thought they could do: Violate the existing understanding of the commerce clause and, in perhaps the most significant moment of judicial activism since the New Deal, overturn either all or part of the Affordable Care Act.

The first step was perhaps the hardest: The Republican Party had to take an official and unanimous stand against the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Typically, it’s not that difficult for the opposition party to oppose the least popular element in the majority party’s signature initiative. But the individual mandate was a policy idea Republicans had thought of in the late 1980s and supported for two decades. They had to, in effect, persuade every Republican to say that the policy they had been supporting was an unconstitutional assault on liberty.

[Riot]

History of the individual mandate

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate is considered to have originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO).

First introduction of the individual mandate:

November, 1993 Consumer Choice Healthy Security Act
Sponsored by Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) & 24 Republican cosponsors

November, 1993 Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act
Sponsored by Senator John H. Chafee (R-RI) & 20 cosponsors (18-R, 2D)

http://healthcarereform.procon.org/v...ourceID=004182