Apparently the Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare has Republicans and the Mitt Romney campaign so flustered that they can’t seem to stay on the same page about how to attack the court decision and President Obama.
The confusion centers around the question of whether the individual mandate, requiring all Americans to get health insurance or pay a fine, is a tax or a penalty. Chief Justice Roberts ruled that the fine was indeed a tax, which allowed him to rule that the law is constitutional because Congress has the right to tax the populace. This ran counter to what the Obama administration had been saying all along, which is that the fine is a penalty, not a tax. Because we all know the word tax is the nastiest three-letter word in the language of politics.
But calling it a tax raises a problem for Romney. See, when Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he passed universal healthcare for every citizen of his state—and if you don’t get it you have to pay a fine. It is Romney’s Massachusetts law that the Obama administration used as a model for Obamacare—and they even hired a slew of advisors and consultants from Massachusetts to make sure they got it right. That Romney is now trying to claim that the Massachusetts law is fundamentally different from Obamacare is silly and no one in the political establishment really believes it.
So if this fine that the citizens of Massachusetts have to pay is called a tax, that means that Romney could then be charged with hitting the people of his former state with a tax increase. We know how much Republicans hate tax increases.
All of these thoughts led a top advisor to Romney, Eric Fehrnstrom to initially tell MSNBC, “The governor believes what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty and he disagrees with the Court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax.”
But that line of attack, agreeing with the Obama administration, didn’t go over very well at campaign headquarters. So Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus came out and said it was a tax. And now Romney himself is saying it’s a tax.
“Well, I said that I agreed with the dissent. And the dissent made it very clear that they felt it was unconstitutional,” he said in an interview with CBS. “But the dissent lost — it’s in the minority. And so now the Supreme Court has spoken. And while I agreed with the dissent, that’s taken over by the fact that the majority of the Court said it is a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There is no way around that.”
The Romney campaign has essentially wasted a week delighting the media with a confusing tax-no tax volley that only serves to bring more attention to the fact that Romney is completely toothless when he tries to attack Obamacare because his baggage is so heavy and distracting. The next four months will be interesting, watching Romney try to twist and squirm on the healthcare question while the entire country knows the real deal—he was a big fan of universal healthcare until he realized he needed to have the opposite position in order to win the presidency.
