This primary campaign season has been chock-full of Republican candidates offering various explanations for now-unpopular positions they’ve held in the past. Tim Pawlenty has apologized for supporting cap and trade legislation, Rick Santorum has admitted that his support for an unfunded Medicaid drug program was a mistake, and Donald Trump has disavowed basically every position he’s ever held in his life. But no candidate is saddled with an albatross from the past as badly as Mitt Romney. Today, Romney made a highly anticipated speech in an early effort to quell the conservative disgust over RomneyCare, the heath-care reform plan he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts — and even more specifically, the allegedly freedom-crushing, un-American individual mandate that required Massachusetts citizens to purchase health insurance, which was later adopted into President Obama’s health-care reform. The Times reports that Romney declined to run away from the legislation, or admit that he was wrong:
Instead, Romney tried to defend the mandate by contrasting it with the federal mandate that Republicans have rallied against (and sued over) for the past two years. Romney on his own mandate:
Everyone recognizes that Obama’s mandate is supposed to do the same exact thing, but to Romney, there’s a huge difference: Massachusetts is a state, and mandates are undoubtedly Constitutional when enforced by a state. As the Wall Street Journal reports:
[H]is main defense was constitutional. Under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, the states have the power to experiment the way Massachusetts did, he said. Quoting former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, he called states “the laboratories of democracy” where such experiments drive innovation.
He’s made the same argument plenty of times before, and it may appease some critics. But the Wall Street Journal isn’t one of them. In a scathing editorial this morning, they reiterated that a mandate is abhorrent at any level of government:
We’ll never know if completely disavowing RomneyCare would have been a better strategy for Romney. Most likely, it would have only further cemented his reputation as a politician who flip-flops as political expediency dictates. Either way, he’s chosen the federalism argument, and that’s the one he’ll have to stick with through the campaign. He’s not going to win over the Journal that way, but we’ll have to wait until the primaries heat up until we find out if it can convince the voters, or if the voters even care about health-care reform as much as everyone assumes they will.
Obama’s Running Mate [WSJ]
Mitt Romney defends Mass. health law [Politico]
