Thoughts On The Mandate (Among Other Things)

1.  The emerging strategy among Democrat-aligned journalists is way too inside baseball to help Obama in this election.  According to polls, the median voter already thinks that the individual insurance purchase mandate is unconstitutional and should be struck down by the Supreme Court.  The median voter is not more likely to start believing that the mandate is unconstitutional once (IF!!) the Supreme Court strikes it down.  The median voter isn’t going to be any more likely to support the mandate because a liberal journalist tells her or him that that John Chaffee supported a federal mandate twenty years ago.  They don’t know who John Chaffee is and they don’t care.  They might also reasonably wonder why they should start thinking that the federal government suddenly has the power to order them to contract with a government-favored private firm to purchase a product they don’t want just because some guy says that some other guy you never heard of said so before he died.  This strategy might have some influence in how liberal-aligned institutions (the academy the mainstream media) interpret a Supreme Court decision striking down the mandate (and maybe an Obama defeat), but that is a down-the-line problem as conservatives will have to try to get their message out to younger cohorts who weren’t there for the health care debate and will only be learning about it passively from liberal-leaning sources. 

2.  The idea of Progressivism as the working out of the ever more radical expansion of the pro-freedom implications of Lockeanism is a fair description of our (mostly) pro-abortion, pro-Second Amendment, pro-free speech (even when it is the Koch brothers rather than the Sulzberger family’s media empire) and presumably anti-federal mandate and pro-same sex marriage swing Justice.  It doesn’t work so well with those progressives who market themselves as progressives.  They don’t care so much about freedom if you want to own a gun, not have to buy a federally mandated insurance policy, and not have your company’s or religious organization’s funds go to fund contraception (and someday abortion if the “progressives” stay in power long enough.)  Oh, and if you think that you and those who agree with you that you should be able to spend your funds on ads to influence public policy, then  shut up and think again.  Progressives are against well funded media power - unless it is the New York Times .  Now you can come up with “pro-freedom” rationales for these policies.  We need to be able to ban guns to prevent knuckle dragging, religion drooling, bitter clingers from shooting up the country.  You need restrictions on funding for right-wing affiliated groups.  The wrong information that ads from those groups convey gives people ideas they would not get from reading the news sections of our great newspapers.  That wrong information also gets in the way of plans of our pro-freedom proletarian legislators like John Kerry and Jay Rockefeller.  Somebody has to get those rich people and media organizations (well the bad ones with bad ideas) under control.  We need to force religious organizations to fund contraception.  People have a right to contraception.  Hey, people have a right to choose abortion.  And that means that the right to have an abortion.  Does the Constitution include a right not to pay for an abortion if you don’t want to?  Of course not.  That would be silly.  So if the government decides that mandating private organizations funding abortion is the best way to make sure the right to abortion is realized, then you have to pay.  If they want you to have an abortion clinic on site, then that’s what you’ll do, or you can close down if you don’t like it.  It’s all in the interstate commerce clause and it’s the right thing to do.  But they believe in freedom of conscience.  They won’t mandate that you like it.  Progressives are pro-freedom after all.

All of this is to say that, when it comes to our present progressives, “progress” means nothing more and nothing less than the preponderant policy preferences and resentments of those who strongly affiliate with the center-left.  The expansion or diminution of freedom be damned.