Credit where credit’s due–Ann Coulter is calling for an actual debate on the issues.

“The way the Right can beat Obama…is not to attack Obama as a person by calling him an ‘Kenyan colonialist’ and the like, but to go after his policies, as Reagan did with Carter.” http://bit.ly/zfqjGP

I don’t believe for a second that Ann has undergone a conversion, but she is politically astute and can sense when a strategy has run its course.  Her comments are a veiled warning that the crazy talk by GOP pundits and politicians is driving the party over a cliff.

Last week, she shocked her gang with this post:

THREE CHEERS FOR ROMNEYCARE!

http://bit.ly/xUKmDe

In this article, Ann explains that mandatory insurance was a conservative, Republican policy:

“Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats’ piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry…A leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped design Romneycare [which was praised] for making consumers, not business or government, the primary purchasers of health care.”

Note the dismissive tone Coulter uses in discussing the constitutional debate over state vs. federal mandates: ”The only reason the ‘individual mandate’ has become a malediction is because the legal argument against Obamacare is [that] someone sitting at home, minding his own business, is not engaged in ‘commerce … among the several states,’ and, therefore, Congress has no authority under the Commerce Clause to force people to buy insurance.”

“No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance.  States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive. There’s no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today’s world to equip themselves with health insurance.”

[Ann doesn't mention the Militia Act of 1792 that required able-bodied men to obtain a long list of equipment--the first FEDERAL mandate that I've located.]

While not conceding the jurisdictional debate, Coulter makes it clear that, for individuals, the outcome is the same–people can be required to purchase health insurance.  Pragmatically, she wants her party to refocus its energies. ”The hyperventilating over government-mandated health insurance confuses a legal argument with a policy objection.”

The balance of her article addresses what she sees as overreaching and micromanaging by the Democrats–too much health care must be purchased, the subsidy threshhold is too high, etc.  Yes, she laces this section with her typical vitriol, including the (mandatory) reference to Karl Marx, but the insults are directed at philosophy and policy, not people.  This is a debate worth having.

Thanks Ann!