May 15, 2014 03:42 PM UTC

Beauprez and the Individual Mandate, Part II: Forget All That!

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• by: Colorado Pols

Yesterday, we republished a now-deleted blog post written by GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez, which featured Beauprez articulately defending an individual mandate that every American carry health insurance coverage–one of the core components of "Obamacare." Beauprez took this position in defense of then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whose "RomneyCare" health care reform plan for Massachusetts was centered on a similar mandate that residents obtain insurance or pay a tax penalty. Beauprez wrote unequivocally on Romney's behalf, "just as motorists are required to have auto insurance, and lenders require homeowners insurance, citizens should have to have health insurance."

Obviously, that's not a position Beauprez could afford to stick with and expect the "Tea Party" to support him in any future endeavor–any more than Romney could as the GOP presidential candidate in 2012. And sure enough, in a June 2012 video clip, filmed at an Americans for Prosperity rally the day after the Supreme Court's decision upholding the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate, we hear a very different Bob Beauprez:

BEAUPREZ: We now apparently have a government that is big enough, powerful enough, to tax us into submission. Who would have thought? As the Wall Street Journal said this morning, a mandate is now a tax, except when it isn't… [Pols emphasis]

In a 5-4 decision yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, a decision that, uh, I'm not, I'm not an attorney, I didn't even play one on television. But I think I know what happened. We had an extremely tortured case of legalese logic, to get to a conclusion that while this mandate, while this legislation didn't violate, didn't violate the Commerce Clause, it somehow was okay under the taxing authority of the government although the author, the architect, the chief proponent of this legislation swore vehemently this was not a tax. Now if that isn't convoluted logic, tell me what is? It is what it is. And where are we now?

"Where are we now," Beauprez asks? Well, if anyone listening to 2012's Bob Beauprez knew what Beauprez was saying in 2008 about the very same individual mandate, they'd have no idea where Beauprez is now. We assume Beauprez will respond with a similarly tortured explanation for why this is not the same massive flip-flop it was when Romney pulled it–Romney's mandate wasn't a federal mandate, or RomneyCare was right for socialist Massachusetts but clearly wrong for real Americans, et cetera.

How did that work out for President Romney again, folks?