In an interview Wednesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) attacked the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the newly passed health care reform bill, despite his support for an individual mandate in 1993.
“In 1993, we were trying to kill HillaryCare, and I didn’t pay any attention to [the individual mandate], because that was a part of a bill I just hadn’t centered on,” Hatch said in an interview with CNN’s Campbell Brown, “but since then, of course, 17 years later, when it comes up and I know it’s possible it’s going to pass, I looked at it, and constitutionally, I came to the conclusion, and everyone came to the conclusion, that this would be the first time in history that the federal government requires you to buy something you don’t want.”
The individual mandate is currently the subject of lawsuits seeking to overturn the health care reform bill.
Hatch suggested the issue is “a matter of liberty. If we allow the federal government to tell us what we can or can’t buy, then our liberties are gone. This is a very important issue of liberty.”
Earlier in the interview, Hatch had also defended Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) “Viagra Amendment,” which would ban registered sex offenders from receiving impotence drugs. The amendment was part of the GOP’s new soundbite strategy, meant to force Democrats to vote down politically juiced-up amendments, and likely turn them into political ads meant to characterize Dems as sympathetic to sex offenders and fraudsters.
Still, Hatch said, “I don’t think that was an inappropriate amendment. It was a health care amendment, a smart amendment.”
Hatch also defended Coburn, praising him as “one of the smartest people in the whole doggone Senate, and who is always straight up about what he does, is never trying to play games or pull punches. He actually does what he believes.”
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