Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas The individual-responsibility provision was originally a Republican idea" said White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest during
the Daily Press Briefing yesterday.
By saying so
the White House public strategy team clearly seeks to alter the common terminology of individual mandate" to a politically more palatable individual responsibility."
The Obama White House beset by a barrage of liberal criticism over a widely-acclaimed inept defense of its signature domestic policy achievement Wednesday defended the health care laws constitutionality not on legal grounds but on purely partisan ones.
Earnest called Obamas national health care law a bipartisan idea" designed to confront difficult health care challenges."
White House deputy press secretary Earnest even now claimed President Obamas Affordable Care Act drew its policy inspiration from GOP front-runner Mitt Romneys health care law in Massachusetts.
Thats a purely political argument to a Constitutional question.
Earnest offered no defense along the lines of the precedential history of Congress and the Commerce Clause. It is the reach and scope of commerce-clause authority that is at the heart
of the Supreme Courts scrutiny of the Obama-initiated health care law.
The White House has seen this movie before: a press corps in a lather about what may happen to knock the administration off its preferred course of action.
Three days of high-court drama did however has clearly put President Obama and his presidency in a spot no president wants to be under siege as the underlying constitutional justification of his health care reform law long questioned in polling data is now under intense nationwide scrutiny.
Whether it intended to or not the White House gave voice to critics who contend the law is rooted in outcomes expanded access to insurance coverage and a variety of health care benefits rather than adhering to traditional definitions of federal power and the Commerce Clause.
That scrutiny may lead to the laws undoing and at its first opportunity to justify the law this week the White House chose
partisan & political arguments in response to the constitutional inquiry.
