On Friday’s “The Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist George Will explained that Obamacare’s collapse, from its disastrous rollout to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s launch of the nuclear option, helps to fulfill the so-called “progressive dream.”
Will also called President Barack Obama’s selective enforcement of his 2010 health care reform law “lawlessness” and warned the public would see the law as “in flux.”
“Listen, there’s a kind of lawlessness here,” Will said. “And it’s cynical lawlessness. You know, Lily Tomlin the comedian used to portray a character she called the bag lady who said no matter how cynical you get, you just can’t keep up. And I think Americans are beginning to feel that way. This looks like a clever move. Now, it’s all right in politics to be clever, but you don’t want to look like you’re trying to be clever because that looks tricky and sneaky. And, in fact, as the president continues to waive this and suspend that and exercise what he calls enforcement discretion, the American people are beginning to feel that the law is in constant flux. And if the law is in constant flux like by the way the rules of the Senate, there is no law just as there are no more rules in the Senate anymore.”
As for the “cleverness” of the Obama administration delaying parts of the legislation past the 2014 midterm elections, Will said that was just one part of the law, which will lead to its eventual collapse when it is exposed as being an income transfer and redistribution tool.
“If people knew a month before the election, they would at least know,” Will said. “Now they’re going to have their imagination fired by Republicans telling them to be afraid, be very afraid of what you’re going to learn after the election because they don’t want you to know before the election. I don’t think this is clever. But, Megyn, the Obamacare is collapsing under the weight of accumulated cleverness. It was passed by clever parliamentary maneuvers, passed by cleverness in the cornhusker kickback and the Gatorade and the Louisiana Purchase and all the other deals. It is constructed in huge complexity because it’s supposed to be a clever way of disguising the fact that this whole scheme is a large income transfer and redistribution mechanism as much as it is a health care plan. So, the cleverness compounding cleverness compounding cleverness, and it’s beginning to look not a bit clever.”
The bigger picture he said, when factoring in Obamacare and Reid’s maneuver in the Senate, was that this was the “fulfillment” of a belief that America needed a stronger, more centralized federal government in Washington, D.C.
“What is going on is the fulfillment of a progressive dream 100 years old,” he continued. “A hundred years ago, we were in the first year of the first progressive Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. He thought, he was the first president every to criticize the American founding, which he did not do at the margins; he criticized at root and branch. He said the separation of powers is inappropriate for the modern age because America, to be governed, needs to have more power concentrated in Washington. More and more Washington power concentrated in the executive branch.”
“And more and more executive branch power concentrated in executive agencies immunized from control or even supervision and oversight by Congress. The marginalization of Congress has been a constant goal of progressivism. This is why conservatism, modern conservatism was really born in reaction to a strong executive, Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal, a strong executive of Lyndon Johnson during the great society. Conservatives had a robust and I think healthy suspicion of executive power until they had the one-fourth experience of Ronald Reagan, the president of their own.”