Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, center,
says Democrats used a "deeply dishonest sales pitch" with the health care
law.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Opponents target the health care law after the Supreme Court upholds it
- Sen. Mitch McConnell says President Obama deceived the nation about the law
- Democrats note that Mitt Romney backed the concept as Massachusetts governor
- The issue will be the focus of continued sharp debate in the November
election
Washington (CNN) -- Republicans launched a blistering attack
Friday on the health care reform law upheld by the Supreme Court, seeking to
rally their base's opposition to the measure to bolster their fortunes in the
November election.
Using the court's finding that
the centerpiece of the law -- the individual mandate -- amounted to a legal
exercise of congressional taxing power, GOP leaders accused President Barack
Obama and Democrats of deceiving the nation about the Affordable Care Act during
debate on the measure in 2009 and 2010.
Senate Republican leader Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky led the charge, saying Democrats used a "deeply dishonest
sales pitch" to overcome public opposition to the measure back then.
"Nearly every day since then, the
promises that formed the heart of that sales pitch have been exposed for the
false promises they were," McConnell said on the Senate floor, adding that the
Supreme Court decision Thursday provided "powerful confirmation of what may have
been the biggest deception of all."
He urged Democrats to stop
"trying to defend the indefensible" and join with Republicans to repeal the
health care law.
Obama said mandate isn't tax
in 2009
Health care questions
answered
How will law affect health
care costs?
Health care ruling energizes
voters
Meanwhile, Rep. Michele Bachmann,
R-Minnesota, a tea party favorite and leading opponent of health care reform,
said she and congressional colleagues were sending a letter to state officials
urging them not to implement the health care bill until after the November
vote.
"All across job creator
boardrooms today, decisions are being made by millions of employers to drop the
employer covered health insurance," Bachmann claimed Friday on CNN. "... That's
why we're telling the states just stop, take a breath, because we're going to
turn the economy around after November."
The polarizing law is the
signature legislation of Obama's time in office, and opposition to it helped
spur the creation of the conservative tea party movement.
Friday's rhetoric by McConnell
and other Republicans reflected their shock and anger at the high court
decision, which rejected the challenges of opponents who contended the health
care law was unconstitutional.
In a 5-4 ruling, the court
decided the individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance was
valid as a tax, even though it was impermissible under the Constitution's
commerce clause.
The most anticipated Supreme
Court ruling in years allows the government to continue implementing the health
care law, which doesn't take full effect until 2014. That means popular
provisions that prohibit insurers from denying coverage for pre-existing medical
conditions and allow parents to keep their children on family policies to the
age of 26 will continue.
However, Republican opponents of
the law's expansion of government vowed to continue fighting to repeal it, with
certain presidential nominee Mitt Romney saying that defeating Obama in November
is the only way to meet that goal.
Both presidential campaigns are
citing fund-raising spikes following the Supreme Court's decision.
Romney's
organization said Friday it had raised $4.6 million online, and Obama's
operation, while not revealing specific numbers, said it had surpassed that
total.
The individual mandate is the
linchpin of the health care law signed by Obama in 2010 after an epic brawl in
Congress in which no Republicans supported the measure.
Obama has denied the mandate is
a tax, including a 2009 interview with ABC in which he compared it to state
requirements that motorists carry auto insurance.
"Nobody considers that a tax
increase," Obama said then. "People say to themselves, 'that is a fair way to
make sure that if you hit my car, that I'm not covering all the costs.' "
At least 4 million people are
expected to pay a penalty for not having health insurance when the rule takes
full effect in 2016, bringing in about $54 billion to help offset the $1.7
trillion, 10-year cost of the act, according to the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office.
It's one of several
revenue-raising provisions in the health care law, according to Lawrence Jacobs,
a University of Minnesota political scientist and co-author of a 2010 book on
the health care battle.
Under the health care law when
it is fully implemented in coming years, most Americans will be covered by
employee health plans, either their own or that of a head of household, or by
existing government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid or veterans' benefits,
Jacobs noted.
Of the roughly 6% of the
population remaining, a large portion of those will be exempted from the mandate
either because of poverty, religious belief or other reasons, he said.
Bachmann's allegation that the
health care law would lead to fewer U.S. jobs was challenged on CNN by
Democratic Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware.
"If they're not hiring, it's
because they don't have demand," Markell said. "What they care most about when
they're deciding whether to hire is where do they have access to the greatest
work force. I mean, these charges are just ridiculous."
Democrats also noted that
Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, implemented an individual mandate similar
to the concept in the federal law.
Romney contends the
Massachusetts law was tailored to the state's needs, and that such a solution
was improper at the federal level. He called the law known as Obamacare bad
policy and a bad law on the federal level.
That didn't stop Democratic Rep.
Steve Israel of New York from noting on CNN that Romney "actually defended what
he called a penalty" during his term as Massachusetts governor.
"Not my words, Mitt Romney's
words, were the free riders -- who chose not to get health insurance but shift
those costs onto society -- need to pay their fair share," Israel said. "I
didn't call them free riders. Mitt Romney did."
In Thursday's majority opinion,
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that "the federal government does not have the
power to order people to buy health insurance. ... The federal government does
have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance."
Roberts joined the high court's
liberal wing -- Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor
and Elena Kagan -- in upholding the law.
Four conservative justices --
Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas --
dissented.
"To say that the individual
mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it,"
the dissenting justices wrote in their opinion. "Imposing a tax through judicial
legislation inverts the constitutional scheme, and places the power to tax in
the branch of government least accountable to the citizenry."
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal
poll released Tuesday indicated that 37% of Americans would have been pleased if
the law had been found unconstitutional, compared with 28% who would have been
pleased if it had been found constitutional. And the poll of 1,000 U.S. adults
found that nearly four in 10 surveyed would have "mixed feelings" had the
justices struck down the whole law.
Obama, in televised remarks,
called Thursday's Supreme Court ruling a victory for the nation.
He used the focus on the issue
to spell out the benefits of the law that remains unpopular with many Americans.
The principle upheld by the high court's ruling is that no American should go
bankrupt because of illness, the president said.
"I know the debate over this law
has been divisive," Obama said. "It should be pretty clear that I didn't do this
because it was good politics. I did it because I believe it is good for the
country."
He said the country can't afford
"to refight the political battle of two years ago or go back to the way things
were."
House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi of California, who helped push through the law when she was House
speaker, cited the late Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, a longtime
proponent of health care reform who died before the bill became law.
"Now he can rest in peace," she
told reporters, echoing what she'd earlier told Kennedy's widow by phone.
In his opinion, Roberts appeared
to note the political divisions, writing that "we do not consider whether the
act embodies sound policies."
"That judgment is entrusted to
the nation's elected leaders," the opinion said. "We ask only whether Congress
has the power under the Constitution to enact the challenged provisions."
The narrow focus of the ruling
on key issues such as the individual mandate -- limiting it to taxing powers
rather than general commerce -- represented the court's effort to limit the
government's authority.
"The framers created a federal
government of limited powers and assigned to this court the duty of enforcing
those limits," Roberts wrote. "The court does so today."
In another part of Thursday's
decision, the high court ruled that a part of the law involving Medicaid must
change.
The law calls for an expansion
of eligibility for Medicaid, which involves spending by the federal government
and the states, and threatens to remove existing Medicaid funding from states
that don't participate in the expansion. Thursday's ruling said the government
must remove that threat.
I have not been as overwhelmed with grief at the Supreme
Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act as some of my fellow conservatives.
I was wondering whether I was just being naive, but since I just listened in
person to a talk from Paul Clement, who actually argued the case on behalf of
the states before the Supreme Court, and his feelings seemed to resonate with my
own, I feel a little more confident now to share what might be some of the
silver linings in this decision:
