As America waits for the Supreme Court to render their decision on the constitutionality of the individual mandate which is the heart of the Obamacare law and whether the lack of severability clause within the signed version of the law is cause to overturn the entire law, a New York Times/CBS News poll finds that 68 percent of Americans want some or all of the Obamacare aka Affordable Care Act, to be overturned.The law was opposed by Americans at the time of passage and opposition to the law is still at incredibly high levels as poll averages show.
• 41 percent want the entire law overturned.
• 27 percent want the individual mandate overturned.
• Only 24 percent want the entire law kept as is.
The Breakdown as reported by NYT's The Caucus:
There was greater Republican opposition to the law than Democratic support. About two-thirds of Republicans in the recent survey said the entire law should be overturned, while 43 percent of Democrats said all of the law should be upheld.
More than 70 percent of independent voters said they wanted to see some or all of the law struck down, with a majority saying they hoped to see the whole law overturned. Twenty-two percent of independents said they hoped the entire law would survive.
I have maintained consistently that no matter what the Supreme Court decides, this is a lose-lose situation for Obama during a presidential election year.
If the Supreme Court keeps the law exactly as is, Republicans are going to be able to use the anger Americans had and still have over how the law was passed by a then-Democratically controlled House of Representatives, a Democratically controlled Senate and signed into law by Democrat Obama, against the opposition of the majority of Americans and with no bipartisan support.
If the Supreme Court overturns the individual mandate or the entire law because of it's lack of a severability clause, Republicans will be able to use Obama and Democrats passage of a law, when they controlled Congress and the White House, that violated American's constitutional rights.
Remember: In March of 2012, the Washington Post reported on a study, which ran 10,000 simulations in which all vulnerable Democrats voted against the health care bill and found it would have saved Democrats an average of 25 seats.
Furthermore, in 62 percent of the simulations, had Democrats voted against Obamacare, Democrats would have kept control of the House of Representatives.
Abstract from that study:
We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health carereform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case, more liberal), which in turn was associated with lower support for those incumbents. Our analyses show that this perceived ideological difference mediates most of the apparent impact of support for health carereform on both individual-level vote choice and aggregate-level vote share.We conclude by simulating counterfactuals that suggest health care reform may have cost Democrats their House majority.
Their full 37 page analysis can be found here. (PDF)
No matter what the Supreme Court rules, Obamacare is going to be a hammer that is used against Obama for the November 2012 presidential election just as it was used against House Democrats in 2010.
