Ezra Klein has an article in The New Yorker on why politicians reverse their positions, and he focuses on the politics of the individual mandate. The article offers a useful guide to a number of ideas, e.g., the psychological concept of “motivated reasoning.”

Ezra cites the Dole-Chafee plan as evidence for the proposition that the individual mandate had been widely embraced by Republicans in years past. We discussed the Dole-Chafee plan in this space back in 2010. There was considerable opposition to Dole-Chafee among congressional Republicans when it was introduced in 1993, though the opposition did not center on the individual mandate. Rather, it centered on the proposal’s potential cost. 

But one reason could be that the discussion of the individual mandate never really left elite policymaking circles. The Dole-Chafee proposal was never very close to becoming law, and so it did not receive the same intense scrutiny as the various coverage expansion proposals backed by the Clinton White House and, years later, the Obama White House. Had the individual mandate attracted wider attention, it’s not clear that it would have been embraced by the grassroots right and by conservative legal thinkers attracted to textualism and originalism.

It is of course very difficult to evaluate this kind of counterfactual, but we have something like a crude test case in the recent reversal of fortune of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which Patrick Ruffini and I wrote about for National Review a few months back: 

Like most examples of Beltway cronyism, SOPA was the product of an out-of-touch bipartisan lobbyist elite, and it understood precious little about the networked and decentralized medium it proposed to regulate. This elite badly underestimated the political power of an “Internet public” connected by social media and smartphones. A guerrilla force of techies and populists, ranging across the political spectrum from MoveOn.org to the Tea Party Patriots, joined forces to mount an unconventional assault on Hollywood’s lobbying arm, which had spent $94 million lobbying for copyright legislation in 2011. The result: the January 18 Web blackout that prompted millions of calls to Capitol Hill, forced dozens of lawmakers to switch sides, and consigned SOPA to the dustbin of history — for now.

After both sides of the SOPA debate had been heard, it was conservatives who were quicker to rally to the side of the rebels. At one point hours into the Internet blackout, 26 of the 29 legislators who had switched sides were Republicans. Minnesota Democrat Al Franken, who had fashioned himself the Senate’s chief defender of the “open Internet,” would go on to send an e-mail message to supporters defending the Protect IP Act in the name of “middle class workers — most of them union workers” who work in industries that depend on intellectual-property law. Franken, himself a card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild, represented in microcosm the coalition of Hollywood and labor threatened by the disruptive forces of technology. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats, privately seethed at Republicans who withdrew their co-sponsorship, among them Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio.

Behind the scenes, Republicans were using the piracy debate to register their displeasure at Harry Reid and his imperious management of the Senate. When Reid put the Protect IP Act on the Senate floor schedule, the bill’s main Republican proponents were not even consulted. A few days before the scheduled floor vote, a group of Republican senators, including chief Republican sponsor Chuck Grassley and Utah conservative Mike Lee, called upon Reid to delay consideration of the bill indefinitely.

Republican opposition to SOPA, though influenced by many factors, is rooted in conservative skepticism about the imposition of regulations rigged to favor powerful corporate insiders. This skepticism wasn’t on display for most of the Bush era, when many in the GOP reconciled themselves to being part of a pro-business rather than a pro-market and pro-freedom political movement. Public hostility to the Wall Street bailouts and the rise of the Tea Party provided a useful corrective, and conservatives in Congress now wish to be on the side of consumers and the entrepreneurs who serve them, rather than that of crony capitalists who use state power to extract rents. [Emphasis added]

Here we have a roughly parallel situation. For many years, the governance of the Internet and anti-piracy policy had been issues of interest to a relatively small group of policy demanders, many of whom were employed by the entertainment industry. For a variety of reasons, however, the larger “Internet public” became engaged when a small number of thought leaders determined that SOPA represented a grave threat to the open Internet. Some of these thought leaders were libertarians and conservatives who articulated coherent “pro-market and pro-freedom” reasons for right-of-center politicians to reverse positions that they had held in the past, though never very intensely. 

One possibility is that legislators, regardless of political coloration, tend to outsource their thinking on specialized policy domains to trusted proxies, in think tanks, lobbying shops, etc. Ezra’s article includes the following passage:

But, whatever the motives of individual politicians, the end result was the same: a policy that once enjoyed broad support within the Republican Party suddenly faced unified opposition—opposition that was echoed, refined, and popularized by other institutions affiliated with the Party. This is what Jason Grumet, the president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a group that tried to encourage Republicans and Democrats to unite around policy solutions, calls the “think-tank industrial complex”—the network of ideologically oriented research centers that drive much of the policy debate in Washington. As Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, who has announced that she is leaving the Senate because of the noxious political climate, says, “You can find a think tank to buttress any view or position, and then you can give it the aura of legitimacy and credibility by referring to their report.” And, as we’re increasingly able to choose our information sources based on their tendency to back up whatever we already believe, we don’t even have to hear the arguments from the other side, much less give them serious consideration. Partisans who may not have strong opinions on the underlying issues thus get a clear signal on what their party wants them to think, along with reams of information on why they should think it.

Ezra’s basic thesis, as I understand it, is that Republican policymakers abandoned their old views on the individual mandate because Republican politicians decided that they were no longer politically convenient, and then everyone decided that opposition to the individual mandate was a deep conservative principle. 

The anti-SOPA fight, however, suggests that there could be another mechanism. Consider the following stylized story:

Stuart Butler introduces the idea of an individual mandate for the purchase of catastrophic medical insurance in 1989. Butler, a prolific policy entrepreneur who also championed the Thatcherite-Kempite idea of “enterprise zones,” is a creative thinker who first cut his teeth in Britain, where constitutional sensitivities are (for obvious reasons) not as central a part of the political-institutional discourse. Among the small coterie of conservative domestic policy thinkers, the individual mandate idea doesn’t spark any intense objections.

At the start of the Clinton administration, a number of liberal and moderate Republicans, including Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island, seek to craft a viable alternative to a coverage expansion proposal that seems extraordinarily ambitious and expensive. Eventually, Chafee works with other moderate legislators and congressional staffers to craft a less expensive alternative. At the time, staffers tended to see themselves as non-ideological. It was relatively common for people who were entirely comfortable with the expansion of public spending and the social welfare state to serve on the staff of moderate Republicans in both houses of Congress, as the ideological landscape was not quite as polarized as it is today. Butler’s individual mandate idea gained currency among staffers and legislators. Yet as Paul Starr recounts, the Dole-Chafee bill was poorly crafted: it lacked specificity on a number of core questions, it seemed to radically underestimate the cost of coverage expansion, and it lost credibility on the political right.

The defeat of President Clinton’s coverage expansion effort meant that we heard relatively little about the individual mandate concept from Republicans for some time, though it did materialize on a few occasions, e.g., as the basis of the coverage expansion effort in Massachusetts that passed in 2006. At this stage, however, a number of conservatives outside of elite policymaking circles started paying attention to the mandate as a vehicle of coverage expansion. And many of them didn’t like it. 

Moreover, activist libertarian legal scholars like Randy Barnett began articulating a more ambitious constitutional agenda that matched the mood of a grassroots right that had grown alienated from the Bush White House and, more broadly, a conservative domestic policy establishment that seemed out of tune in a variety of ways with rank-and-file Republican voters, in ways that don’t always follow a clear ideological script, e.g., many of these voters opposed both Social Security reform and comprehensive immigration reform.

Attuned to this more volatile, more fickle constituency, Republican lawmakers adapted to the new environment: when ideological conservatives expressed objections to the individual mandate, which were not entirely dissimilar to those expressed by Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, the congressional GOP was more inclined to listen, both because they wanted to be in tune with the mood of their supporters and because opposition to the president looked like a winning political strategy. 

As with SOPA, the fact that a large number of Republican lawmakers in 1993 backed an individual mandate doesn’t necessarily mean (alas) that they had thought deeply about the issue. Rather, they had outsourced thinking on that question to credible policy elites. But when they had good ideological and political reasons to think otherwise, they flipped. That is, when new elite voices became engaged in the conversation and contested the claims made by the narrower elite, the issue moved from the realm of the uncontroversial to the controversial — and the side that won was the side that was more in tune with the larger ideological community.

My story could be wrong. But the reason I think there might be something to it is that perhaps the key architect of the individual mandate, with due deference to Stuart Butler, is Laurie Rubiner, who I’ll discuss in the next post.