Politico reports that a few centrist Dems are planning to do what centrist Dems always do:
A handful of moderate Senate Democrats are looking for ways to roll back the highly contentious individual mandate — the pillar of President Barack Obama’s health care law — a sign that red-state senators are prepared to assert their independence ahead of the 2012 elections.
….And it’s not just health care. The senators are prepared to break with the White House on a wide range of issues: embracing deeper spending cuts, scaling back business regulations and overhauling environmental rules. The moderates most likely to buck their party include [the usual suspects….]
Second things first: on non-healthcare issues, I understand this entirely. Red-state Democrats want to demonstrate their moderate bona fides in order to shore up their 
right flank before the 2012 election. This is standard behavior, completely predictable, and might even work.
But on healthcare, I wonder what they could possibly be thinking? The individual mandate can’t simply be rolled back, it would have to be replaced. And there are ways to do that. But there’s no way that any Republicans will ever vote for any of them. Their base wouldn’t stand for it, it would wreck their chance of having the Supreme Court throw out the whole thing, it would tacitly accept that PPACA is here to stay, and it would provide political cover for vulnerable Democrats. Hell, Republicans wouldn’t even vote for repeal of the 1099 provision last year — a move that virtually everyone in both parties supported — because it might have taken a slight bit of tea party pressure off of Democrats. And that was after the election. There’s just no way that a repeal of the invididual mandate will gain even the slightest traction among conservatives. The whole thing reeks of desperation.
Politics being what it is, it’s vanishingly unlikely that there will be any substantial changes to PPACA until after the 2012 election and after the Supreme Court rules on the mandate. Until then, Republicans will hold out hope that they can use it to fan the flames of tea party fury and either (a) win the 2012 election or (b) win the Supreme Court case. Or both! Only once that’s over, and PPACA is fundamentally here to stay, will it be possible to enact any improvements to the law.
