This Is Interesting . . .

Oral arguments on the U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the 2010 health-care law begin in a little over a week, and this Wall Street Journal piece details how difficult it is to score a seat for the proceedings. I found this intriguing:

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, who helped draft the law, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a top-ranking Republican on the Judiciary committee, say they have confirmed seats.

Senator Hatch, like all Republicans, currently opposes ObamaCare's central feature, the Individual Mandate. But this wasn't always the case:

Hatch's opposition is ironic, or some would say, politically motivated. The last time Congress debated a health overhaul, when Bill Clinton was president, Hatch and several other senators who now oppose the so-called individual mandate actually supported a bill that would have required it.

Hatch more than merely supported the Individual Mandate -- he actually co-sponsored a bill (first introduced the late Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I.) that would have included it:

Chafee's plan, one of several Republican alternatives, created a universal tax deduction for health insurance and gave the poor vouchers to buy policies. It also required everyone to buy insurance -- an individual mandate.

Chafee's plan was backed by a group of Republican senators, including Hatch, according to news reports from the time. When the plan was formally introduced as legislation, Hatch was one of the co-sponsors. Two other current senators also co-sponsored the plan: Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

The huge GOP flip-flop on the Individual Mandate is, in my opinion, the biggest under-reported political story since the under-reporting that occurred during the run-up to the Bush Administration's debacle in Iraq.

ObamaCare is probably the most important piece of social legislation enacted in a generation; so one would think it would be a big story that many of those who are now virulently opposed to the law once supported its central feature. Christ, even Radical Right-Wing Extremist Senator Jim Motherfucking DeMint (R-WV) -- who famously pronounced that the GOP was going to "break" Obama on this issue and that it would be the President's "Waterloo" -- actually supported an individual mandate on the national level as recently as 2007!

A major theme of the Obama reelection campaign should be that Republicans are so hell-bent on obstructuing Obama that they have willingly flip-flopped on issues that they not only once supported, but were once their ideas in the first place. There are many such examples of this, but the flip-flop on the mandate should be Exhibit A for the Obama team when it comes to the issue of GOP obstructionism.