From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail, read by business and political leaders around the nation:
It was inevitable that after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger broke his ironclad pledge against tax increases last week by proposing a universal health insurance plan that his old liberal critics would begin to taunt him.
Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a veteran Arnold adversary, was first out of the gate. "This is a plan Assembly Democrats could have written," he crowed. But even more stinging was the New Republic. In its latest issue, its editors recalled the governor’s famous dismissal of his Democratic opponents — who lacked Arnold’s tutoring at the feet of the late Milton Friedman — as "economic girlie-men." The magazine went on to note: "This was before he realized that millions of Californians were struggling with medical bills — and that only government could solve the crisis. Who’s the girlie-man now?"
Worse than such taunts is the legal slam that Arnold’s health care notions received this week from a federal appeals court in Maryland. It ruled that a Maryland law requiring employers either to provide workers with health insurance or to pay into a state heath-care pool was constitutionally invalid. Because the court ruled that the plan violated federal law preempting state regulation of employee benefits, the court’s decision has ominous implications for a similar plank in Arnold’s health plan. Dan Walters, dean of the Sacramento press corps, writes that the court "struck an indirect but potentially fatal blow" to Arnold Care.