In Oct. 2009, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) urged Congress to use the insurance program he created in Massachusetts as a model for nationwide health reform. This proved to be excellent advice, since President Obama signed a law that is based on Romney’s health plan several months later. Nevertheless, Romney plans to deliver a “major policy speech” later today disawowing the very advice he gave Congress less than two years ago — laying out a plan to repeal “Obamacare” and replace it with an unambitious array of minor health reforms. Moreover, Romney’s speech comes just two days after a federal court of appeals heard the first appellate case challenging the ACA on the grounds that it is unconstitutional to require someone to either carry insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. Even though the the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent both unambiguously establish that the ACA is constitutional, the GOP has nearly unanimously endorsed the meritless constitutional attack on the ACA. It wasn’t always this way, however.

THE MANY FACES OF MITT ROMNEY: Romney’s support for a health plan that provides life-saving, affordable health care to nearly every Massachusetts resident has not endeared him to the GOP primary electorate, which is why he’s tried to distance himself from his own single most significant accomplishment. Earlier this year, Romney tried to excuse his decision to sign the prototype for the ACA by explaining that it was just fine for him to sign a state health care plan, but absolutely unacceptable for Obama to sign an almost identical federal health care plan. Needless to say, this kind of hairsplitting did nothing to rescue Romney’s incipient campaign. Sixty-one percent of Republicans in the crucial state of Iowa indicate that they will not vote for someone who “supported a bill at the state level mandating that voters have health insurance.” More importantly, Romney’s bizarre state/federal distinction is at odds with his longstanding position on federal health reform. As far back as 1994, Romney indicated that he would support a Republican health plan that included an insurance coverage mandate. Today’s speech is Romney’s second attempt to wash away his proudest achievement. In it, Romney will recycle a discredited McCain-Palin proposal that would cost 20 million people their employer provided health care, he will embrace the GOP’s plan to gut Medicaid, and he supports a completely unworkable scheme that will allow patients to wait until they get sick to buy insurance, draining all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into and leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

THE GOP’S INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: In 1991, four conservative health policy scholars proposed requiring all Americans to carry health insurance in an effort to “persuade President George H.W. Bush and his administration to adopt a universal health-care proposal that would keep the government from eventually taking over the sector.” Two years later, Sen. John Chafee (R-RI) and 21 mostly Republican co-sponsors introduced a bill which took up this proposal for an individual insurance mandate. Five senators who opposed the ACA — Robert Bennett (R-UT), Kit Bond (R-MO), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) — co-sponsored Chafee’s bill. In mid-2006, Romney became the first elected official to sign an individual insurance mandate into law. Two Republican Senators even voted for an insurance mandate before they voted against it. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) voted in support of a Senate Finance Committee proposal which included an insurance mandate, and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) voted in support of Romney’s health plan as a member of the state legislature. In other words, for all their strident rhetoric against insurance coverage requirements, the truth is this requirement was invented, nurtured and supported for nearly two decades by the GOP.

TEARING UP THE CONSITUTION: Hypocrisy, incoherence, and unworkable plans are the least of the GOP’s sins. They are prepared to tear up the Constitution as well. In a series of lawsuits challenging the ACA, Republicans claim, falsely, that Congress has never before passed a law that imposes a consequence on people who don’t buy a product, and that this somehow makes the ACA unconstitutional. Yet, as a panel of federal judges pointed out on Tuesday, this claim has no basis in the actual text of the Constitution. Rather, the Constitution provides that Congress may “regulate Commerce…among the several states,” and the very first Supreme Court decision interpreting this language made clear that this power is “plenary,” meaning that Congress may choose whatever means it wishes to regulate interstate marketplaces so long as it does not violate another textual provision of the Constitution. Thankfully, it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court will take the GOP up on its offer to replace the actual Constitution with a tenther manifesto, but the fact that one of the nation’s two great political parties believes that they can rewrite the Constitution shows nothing less than utter contempt for the nation’s founding document.