Mitt Romney made the case in 2009 for taking Romneycare national on multiple occasions. Here's one.
Assuming that Republican voters continue trending towards Mitt Romney on Super Tuesday, by the time we wake up on Wednesday, the drama of the GOP nomination battle could be at an end, or at least close to it.
If that happens, then Republicans will have decided to nominate a guy who not only signed the blueprint for Obamacare into law, but who also repeatedly urged President Obama to consider using it as such—including the individual mandate.
First, as I noted on Friday, there's Romney's July, 2009 USA Today op-ed in which he specifically urged President Obama to consider taking the individual mandate national as an alternative to the public option.
"There's a better way," Romney said. "And the lessons we learned in Massachusetts could help Washington find it." Romney's better way? What he did in Massachusetts:
First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages "free riders" to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.
That's the individual mandate, explicitly and unambiguously. Romney didn't say a thing about the Tenth Amendment: he was talking about federal policy.
And as BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski reminds us, on at least three separate occasions in 2009, Mitt Romney made the case for using Romneycare as the blueprint for Obamacare—each of them on video, each of them unambiguously encouraging President Obama to consider Romneycare as a blueprint for Obamacare.
Of course, Mitt Romney is now unalterably locked into denying ever having said the things he said. But the public record doesn't lie. And even though Republicans might not yet fully realize it, they are nominating a guy who has sworn his opposition to the very thing he was demanding just three years ago. It's absolutely irrational—which, in a way, makes Mitt Romney the perfect Republican nominee.