In my post on Sunday, I talked about how, prior to last week and the arguments before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of Obamacare, liberals just didn’t understand that there are real constitutional concerns about Obamacare. And after reading Ezra Klein’s column in The Washington Post (here), it is obvious that at least some liberals still don’t understand.*
You can tell that Mr. Klein doesn’t understand from his first sentence:
“Of all the arguments being waged over the Affordable Care Act … the one dominating the Supreme Court last week is perhaps the most conceptually trivial.”
Mr. Klein goes on to list three ways, other than Obamacare, that health care could have been provided. Among them are a government-provided, single-payer plan a la Medicare and Representative Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) tax credits for buying private health insurance.
Mr. Klein says that increasing taxes and providing Medicare-for-all would clearly be okay under the Constitution, and I think he is probably right. He says the same for Paul Ryan’s tax credit plan, which he also says “is essentially indistinguishable from the mandate [in Obamacare].” He quotes William Gale of the Tax Policy Center:
“‘The economics of saying you get a credit if you buy insurance and you don’t if you don’t [Rep. Ryan’s plan] are not different than the economics of saying you pay a penalty if you don’t buy insurance and you don’t if you do [Obamacare].’”
But what Mr. Klein misses is that the way things are done matters. Process counts. Conservatives believe the Constitution makes a difference. But Mr. Klein doesn’t understand:
“Of course, this battle isn’t really about the constitutionality of the individual mandate. …
The real fight is over whether the Affordable Care Act should exist at all. … The argument against the individual mandate is a pretext to overturn Obamacare.”
Except it’s not. Mr. Klein argues that the fact the constitutionality of the mandate was not raised in Massachusetts, when Massachusetts passed a state mandate to buy health insurance in the mid-2000s, shows that constitutionality is not the real problem with the mandate. Actually, his comments show how badly he is missing the point. Under our federal system, there is no federal constitutional problem with an individual state passing a mandate to buy health insurance. States have the authority to do that under the U.S. Constitution.** It’s the federal government thatmay not. Just because something is unconstitutional when the federal government does it, doesn’t mean it is unconstitutional when a state government does it.
What Mr. Klein apparently doesn’t understand, and what so many liberals miss about conservatives, is that, for us, process matters. Proper procedure counts. We believe that the Constitution is not just a limit on what the government does, but it is also a limit on how the government does what it does. Many liberals don’t get that, but it is critical to conservatives. And it is a big difference between conservatives and liberals.***
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* Even though Mr. Klein’s column was published on Saturday, I did not see it until Monday,
** Whether they have it under their own constitution is a separate question, but it is not one being raised here.
*** Peter Suderman at Reason.com gives one possible reason that many liberals “don’t get it”. I don’t know if it is true, but it is an interesting possibility:
“What can explain liberals’ widespread failure to anticipate the Court’s wariness of the mandate? Research conducted by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests one possible answer: Liberals just aren’t as good as conservatives and libertarians at understanding how their opponents think. Haidt helped conduct research that asked respondents to fill out questionnaires about political narratives—first responding based on their own beliefs, but then responding as if trying to mimic the beliefs of their political opponents. ‘The results,’ he writes in the May issue of Reason, ‘were clear and consistent.’ Moderates and conservatives were the most able to think like their liberal political opponents. ‘Liberals,’ he reports, ‘were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as “very liberal.”’”
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