Ezra Klein on the situational libertarianism of Republicans fighting the Affordable Care Act:
The principle conservatives are fighting for is that they don't like the Affordable Care Act. And having failed to win that fight in Congress, they've moved it to the courts in the hopes that their allies on the bench will accomplish what their members in the Senate couldn't. That's fair enough, of course. But they didn't see the individual mandate as a question of liberty or constitutionality until Democrats passed it into law in a bill Republicans opposed, and they have no interest in changing its name to the "personal responsibility tax," nor would they be mollified if it was called the "personal responsibility tax." The hope here is that they'll get the bill overturned on a technicality. And perhaps they will. But no one should be confused by what's going on.
I think a line needs to be drawn between libertarians who have long seen Wickard as abuse of the commerce clause, and conservatives, who discovered their opposition to the mandate more recently. But like I wrote yesterday, libertarian arguments about the limits of the commerce clause are successful when they mesh with the preferred policy outcomes of conservative Republicans. If that wasn't the case with repeal of the ACA, we wouldn't be here. So, in short, hippies suck, guns are awesome, and covering the uninsured is an affront to the Constitution.
