By Rick Manning
As originally published at TheHill.com.
Ted Cruz won.
Senate Democrats are scrambling to delay the implementation of the very individual mandate they fought to keep in place by choosing to shut down the government.
Now, they apparently have seen the light, no longer bamboozled by Obama’s promises that the $600 million healthcare exchange website would work and that all would be OK in the Sebelius fantasy world if the mean Texan just stopped talking.
Now they have seen the political light even though these same Senate Democrats chose against ending the government shutdown for 16 days by refusing House Republican passed legislation that accomplished essentially what Democrats are currently purporting to support.
Sixteen days of constant reminders that the exchange website was not working did not affect them during the shutdown. They were going to win.
Sixteen days of verification that the implementation of their precious law was the exact train wreck their colleague Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) feared it would be didn’t affect them. The polls said they were doing better than the Republicans, so let the government remain shut.
What frauds.
After putting short-term politics ahead of the nation’s interest, these same hypocrites are now coalescing around a legislative solution to the problem as they scramble for their own political cover.
Stopping ObamaCare from driving millions of voters off of the insurance rolls into an administrative abyss of their own creation somehow is now a political priority.
As each of these Democrats has explained over the years, their ObamaCare law is a delicate balancing act with each part dependent upon the other. Now they desperately want to pull out one of the legs that keep the rickety ObamaCare stool upright for political expediency?
If anything, the entire law should be delayed for one year — the Medicaid expansion, the exchanges, and the employer mandate — all of it or none of it.
This position isn’t playing politics; it is the reality of how the law works.
One week before Halloween, Senate Democrats are seeing their nightmare scenario come true. Millions of people are in the process of being thrown off their health insurance, the healthcare exchange website is as broken as the ObamaCare law itself, premium increases are shocking a public that believed its healthcare would be free, and their political opponents in a position to credibly tell America, “I told you so.”
All those self-proclaimed “adults” inside the Beltway on the right, who were demanding that Sen. Cruz (R-Texas) apologize over the past week, have also been roundly discredited in a mere week, as the Senate Democrats need to deal.
If these “conservatives” hadn’t been such weak-kneed whiners who spent all their time looking for “a way out of the crisis,” ObamaCare would have already been delayed for a year as part of a solution to reopen the government.
Leadership requires vision. Everyone on both sides of the aisle who castigated Sens. Cruz and Mike Lee (R-Utah), along with Reps. Tom Graves (R-Ga.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), for fighting to stop ObamaCare before people got hurt should be forced to publicly thank them.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Manning (@rmanning957) is the vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
