Regardless of how the Affordable Care Act fares in the Supreme Court, let us not forget the history of the individual mandate, the focus of the current constitutional challenge.
It is a Republican idea that Democrats adopted as a way of offering a path towards universal care that maintains the private insurance market and encourages personal responsibility. People talk in the abstract about how poisonous political partisanship has become, but this episode offers a concrete and particularly vivid example of this pathology. Let's be perfectly candid and acknowledge that this is not strictly a bipartisan phenomenon. Ted Kennedy openly worked with G.W. Bush on his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind. Bill Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich's Republican House to pass welfare reform.
However, the GOP could not only find it in themselves to work with Obama on healthcare reform, they took the extra step of passionately attacking a position that they formerly held simply, it seems, to try to deny Obama a legislative victory. If there is another example of either party similarly reversing its position on a major legislative initiative simply because the opposing party adopted it, then I don't know of it.
Ezra Klein lays out the depressing history of the GOP's former enthusiasm for the mandate.
The closest similar example was the Democratic party's rejection of Richard Nixon's attempt to achieve universal coverage through an employer mandate. However, this case was not at all the same, insofar as it was merely each party offering different approaches to the same problem. Late in his life, Ted Kennedy said that failing to reach an agreement with Nixon on this plan was his greatest political regret. Nonetheless, Kennedy did not formerly support a employer mandate and then withdraw his support simply because Nixon adopted it. Kennedy held out for a single payer system.
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