One way to fight Obamacare: "Go limp" [updated]

In case you missed it a week or so back, here's an item from Mario Loyola on whether the states should set up Obamacare exchanges:

States Should Absolutely Refuse to Set Up Obamacare Exchanges

Proponents of Obamacare are making one argument that some conservatives may find appealing — namely that it is much better, from a states’ rights point of view, to set up state-based exchanges than to let the feds come in and do it themselves. This argument is absolutely wrong. Allowing your states to be deputized as instruments of federal policy is just as bad as bowing to federal commandeering of state agencies, which is unconstitutional. [. . .]

State governors should be under no illusions: You are not preserving one iota of state autonomy by setting up your own Obamacare exchange. On the contrary, you are letting the feds deputize you as instruments of federal policy. Let the feds set up the exchanges themselves; they can pay for them and be accountable for the results. That will impose a real limit on federal power, and provide leverage for rolling back some of Obamacare. In the meantime the message of state governments to the Department of Health and Human Services should be an absolute and unequivocal “NO.”

Read the rest. See also Wesley Smith, author of NR's Human Exceptionalism blog and Corner contributor, who concurs:

After an appalling and incoherent Supreme Court ruling and the recent election, it does seem now that utter legal non cooperation is the only way remaining to impede the Leviathan.  Here’s another suggestion: Senate Republicans should filibuster confirmation of the soon-to-be-nominated members of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. No board, no IPAB autocracy. Of course, the president might then make a non-recess recess appointment, but that opens any action taken by IPAB to legal attack.

So, stalwart Obamacare opponents, time for some good old fashioned passive resistance. Go limp.

RTR.

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I just noticed this excellent piece by John Hayward: Obamacare in Crisis as 2013 Approaches. A chunk of it:

. . . Perhaps the most damning indictment offered by the recalcitrant governors is that ObamaCare’s regulations are still largely unwritten.  The governors felt they were being asked to sign a contract that still contained a shocking number of blank pages and penciled-in notes.

An article in The Hill on Sunday shed more light on point number 3.  ”The Obama administration faces major logistical and financial challenges in creating health insurance exchanges for states that have declined to set up their own systems,” noted author Elise Viebeck, who went on to say it was “a situation no one anticipated when the Affordable Care Act was written,” because “the law assumed states would create and operate their own exchanges, and set aside billions in grants for that purpose.”

What?  ”A situation no one anticipated?”  How could that be true?  The governors resisting President Obama’s health-care takeover are not seceding from the Union.  ”Rebellious” is a description of their attitude, not their legal status.  They’re not breaking, or even challenging, any laws; they’re exercising a provision written into ObamaCare, and it’s one of the relatively few sections of that disastrous law that actually was written in ink, at the time of passage.  State governors were always given the option of asking the federal government to run the exchanges in their states.

Is it possible that the power-hungry bureaucrats, clueless central planners, and back-room dealmakers who cooked up ObamaCare truly believed they would get nearly 100 percent compliance from state governors – many of whom were well-known limited-government Republicans – and didn’t really have a “Plan B” for dealing with a sizable number of governors exercising an option that was always present in the law?  If that’s true, it’s another demonstration of the dangerous incompetence of ObamaCare’s authors and signatories.
 
The surprises just keep coming in the Hill article.  Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation, is quoted as saying, “You can’t simply deploy one federal exchange across the board.  Each state is different – their eligibility systems are different, their insurance markets are different.  [HHS is] going to have to build these exchanges to fit into the context of each state.”
 
You mean you can’t run the national health insurance system out of Washington? Now they tell us!  Chalk up another win for ObamaCare’s critics!

What an ungodly mess. RTR.

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Many thanks to Michelle Malkin and Doug Ross for linking.

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