But if they don’t, I think they will in less than three weeks:

What these figures mean is that in the next Congress and in the next cycle these voters will have large numbers of people in office ready and willing to give them their wish. At the same time, 21 states are filing law suits against it; in state elections voters are voting against it; and bad news surprises — soaring premiums and coverage being dropped by employers and companies — are coming out every day.

As a result, we are seeing something unique in our history: an uprising of voters trying in every way possible to roll back an act that was always unpopular, and was passed by means most people think of as borderline legal, and without legitimacy in any sense of the word.

Whether people object to the act or the way it was passed is a moot question, as the answer is “both of them.” And its chances of surviving in the form it was passed in grow less and less every day.

If Obama vetoes a repeal of this legislative atrocity, I think it will seal his doom in 2012, and probably result in even more Republican gains that year.

[Update a few minutes later]

The White House isn’t sure what’s in the bill. Well, that’s perfectly understandable and completely forgiveable. After all, they were much too busy coming up with other schemes to wreck the economy to have had time to read it.

[Update a while later]

The looming Obamacare oil slick:

Russ Feingold spent the last few years telling everyone that ObamaCare would improve health care and reduce costs, yet 55% of Wisconsin residents did not believe this. Imagine how many people would have been opposed to it if they knew it was actually going to increase costs and reduce quality. All of the bill’s secrets are slowly coming to light.

Shortly after the overall bill was passed, Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, issued a memo detailing the estimated financial effects of ObamaCare. Common sense would tell most Americans that a memo like this should have preceded the bill, but that would have ruined Feingold and Pelosi’s surprise.

The CMS memo reveals that in 2019 — long after the bill takes effect — there will still be 23.1 million uninsured. What’s more, page 15 of the memo indicates that the long-term care program contained in the bill is projected to run a deficit after 2025 which the CMS declares is “unsustainable.”

Amazingly, while the main reason given for the rush to health care reform was the rising cost of health care, the memo reveals on page 4 that the new reform will actually increase national health expenditures by $311 billion from 2010 to 2019. That’s $311 billion more in health care costs than if we had no reform at all.

I think that historians will look back on this (and not very long from now) and declare it one of the biggest political blunders in history.

Frequent commenter Carl Pham has a novel and spectacular proposal, that doesn’t stand a chance in hell of being passed:

We need a Paygo Principle when it comes to Federal law. Namely, the total word count of all Federal law is forbidden — let us say by Constitutional Amendment — from increasing. Hence if Congress wants to write new law, they must first repeal or simplify enough existing law so that the total word count will remain unchanged.

And if we really want to encourage healthy competition between the political parties, like we have in the private sector, where firms compete for efficiency in providing a product or service, we can modify this slightly, like so:

(1) Each political party has their own “word credit” which they accumulate by repealing or simplifying law when they are in the majority. Credit does not pass between parties, so, e.g. if the Republicans when they take over in November repeal 50,000 words of law and then get replaced in 2012, the Democrats do not get to take advantage of the Republiicans’ 50,000 word credit. They have to earn their own.

(2) However, any credit remaining at the time you lose power carries over to the next time you gain power. So if the Republicans accumulated credit before being replaced in 2012, they could, when they return to power, immediatley start using that credit.

What I like about (2) is that it instantly reverses the motivations during a lame-duck session, or when you know you’re about to go down in flames. Rather than pass a bunch of law at the last-minute, flouting popular opinion, because you’ve got nothing to lose, you’d be motivated to repeal a bunch of law at the last minute, so as to guarantee yourself a credit when you return to power.

Naturally the other side isn’t going to help you, so you’re going to need to focus on repealing the least popular and most useless aspects of the law favored by your own party — which is very likely to align you better with the public’s wishes. You’ll tend to leave untouched the more popular stuff, and the bipartisan stuff, because you know this is most resistant to being repealed by the other side when they take over — and that helps you minimize how much credit they can accumulate right away.

Actually, I’d like to see the federal code reduced by an order of magnitude, so that could be incorporated into the plan as well. That is, in order to add new words, you’d have to take out ten existing ones for each one added. You could put some kind of floor on it to prevent it from disappearing altogether.

Of course, in order to do so, you’d be formalizing the existence of political parties in the Constitution, which doesn’t mention them at all.

…Big government.

…for the people who, you know, actually vote on these legislative atrocities. From Hanah Volokh (who I assume is related somehow to Eugene and Sasha — sister?). I wonder if the new Congress were to pass such a thing, if the president would veto it? Or perhaps it’s not legislation, just a change to House or Senate rules, in which case, he wouldn’t be involved. Hard to know from just the abstract.