The durable majority for repeal

After PaPACA was enacted in late March, I urged the GOP to campaign on "full and immediate repeal." A few days later, opinion polling found a 55%-42% majority for repeal, with 59% of independents supporting.1

Nevertheless, all the usual caveats about opinion polling applied. It was one poll, taken in the immediate aftermath. Blood was still up. It's much more interesting to see that Rasmussen has been keeping an eye on things, and the majority for repeal appears to be durable. Fourteen weeks later, we learn that a 60%-36% majority favors repeal, comprising not only the predictable 81% of Republicans, but also 65% of independents.

This is happy news indeed! While it remains a full-court shot, undoing the mistake appears a viable goal, at least insofar as public support is there. The GOP can, and should, campaign on a platform of full and immediate repeal. Those two qualifications are important, though. It must be full repeal, because once you start talking about unbundling particular pieces (or worse yet, what will ultimately replace PaPACA), the coalition will crumble.2 It's much easier to assemble a majority against a bad idea than it is to get agreement on what should be done instead. And it must be immediate repeal, because the longer we dither, the longer the odds of success. There is a strike-while-the-iron-is-hot aspect to repeal; "once regulatory programs have given rise to communities of interest in their continuation, amending or repealing [the enabling statute] ... may be more difficult than enacting it in the first place."3 This tendency isn't limited to regulatory programs and is particularly acute with direct entitlements. Once Obamacare goes into full effect, it will create a constituency of dependents primed to oppose repeal tooth and nail. As the old saw goes, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Lastly, it bears noting that as repeal seems possible, it is also desirable. Even if undoing this economic train wreck was not sufficient incentive, there's a more abstract reason to do it. Obamacare represents a catastrophic resurgence of a failed paradigm that must be put back in its cage before it devours more of our heritage. Repealing it would not only disprove Chesterton, who wrote that as the "business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes," that of "Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected," but would also teach, if only for a while, a lesson that progressives should be taught anew in each generation: it isn't a one-way ratchet.4 We should discourage a frame of mind—readily apparent in the last days before the House vote—that sees politics as a desperate struggle to just sink that last putt at all costs on the assumption that once it's in, it's done, and the game is over.

Post facto:
The path forward on PaPACA (11/2/2010)

1. 1. Independent support is important because the current breakdown in voter registration presumptively requires a GOP candidate to win approximately 60% of independents. It therefore is or should be a tough sell to make something the focus of a campaign when it lacks independent support, and conversely, an issue that enjoys independent support is all the more appealing as a campaign issue. Independent support also makes it tough to paint an issue as the sole concern of the fringe, placating faint-of-heart Brooksians.
2. 2. More precisely, the existing cracks and joins in the coalition will become visible and deepen. Cf. my post here.
3. 3. Cynthia Farina, Deconstructing Nondelegation, 33 Harv. J. of L. & P.P. 87, 98 (2010).
4. 4. I am glumly aware that this may get me branded a "fundamentalist." Cf. Richard McBrien, Catholicism 93 (3d ed. 1994) (fundamentalists "want to reclaim a place they feel has been taken from them. They would restore what are presumed or claimed to be old and secure ways retrieved from a world they are losing" (quoting Marty & Appleby, The Glory and the Power 17 (1992))).