Guess what? The battle over the federal Affordable Care Act is over.
Or at least that's what North Country congressman Bill Owens thinks.
Like every politician, party official and activist from Malone to San Diego, the Democrat followed up Thursday's announcement of the Supreme Court's decision with what I'm guessing was one of two statements prepared before the court's decision. Perhaps because Owens waited almost an hour after the ruling was released to zap it out, he avoided the initial online errors of CNN and Fox News by determining that the court had indeed upheld the "individual mandate" and the rest of the law.
"Now that the court has ruled, Democrats and Republicans must come together to implement the law," Owens said. "The goal has always been to expand coverage, improve health care outcomes, and reduce costs for patients and providers. Now the debate is over and it's time to move forward with those goals in mind."
Alas, I must offer this rejoinder: Har-de-har, har-har.
Far from being over, the wrangling over "Obamacare" will be with us until the November elections and beyond. The past few months represented something of a pause after the superheated rhetoric of the Republican presidential primaries, in which the candidates tried to outdo each other by arguing whether the reforms were the worst thing to happen to the nation merely since Pearl Harbor, or all the way back to the Civil War.
But the ruling represents a watershed in the national argument, with provisional winners and losers on both sides — and sometimes in the same person.
Chief Justice John Roberts' deft reasoning made it clear that the court exists to determine constitutionality, not to pick winning federal policies. And his swing vote in the 5-4 decision makes it harder for progressives outraged by the Citizens United campaign finance decision to pigeonhole the Roberts court as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch and Halliburton — at least for a few months, after which the court will return to consider same-sex marriage, affirmative action, voting rights and a pile of other hand grenades.
Because of the court's stamp of semi-approval, President Barack Obama's signature domestic accomplishment doesn't get dropped into the dust bin of history. The political peril is that he'll take Owens' lead and imagine that the game is over.
Now is the time for Obama's speech writers to craft a killer chapter in his stump speech listing the presumptive benefits of the heath care law and exhorting people to go ask the GOP how they would accomplish those things. Rather than treating it like old business, Obama needs to accept Vice President Joe Biden's unguarded description of the bill just after its passage — that the ACA was, and remains, "a big [expletive deleted] deal."
But if there's one clear winner here, it must be Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney circa 2006.
The preservation of the individual mandate is a real testament to his vision and leadership in crafting the Massachusetts plan, which included a penalty for "free riders" that fits the description of a tax in Roberts' decision. For proof, consider that MIT's Jonathan Gruber, whose ideas drove the Massachusetts plan, worked on the federal bill. In a November interview with Reid Pillifant of Capital NY, Gruber called the ACA "the same [expletive deleted — the same one Biden used, by the way] bill."
And what of that other guy, presidential candidate Mitt Romney circa 2012?
Will the opponents of Obamacare be sufficiently incensed by the court's decision to set aside their concerns about Romney's conservative bona fides, and rally around him?
That, my friends, is a big question. Feel free to include your own expletive.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619