A Rasmussen Reports poll released earlier this week showed nearly two-thirds of Americans – 63 percent – calling for the wholesale repeal of the healthcare plan that the president and his liberal enablers pushed through Congress without the civic lubrication of a consenting electorate.

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Back in February – when liberals were in fever pitch over the prospect that a filibuster might derail their ambitions to make healthcare a federal utility – America’s columnist laureate, George Will, remarked of the Democratic Party’s fainting spells, “Filibusters are devices for registering intensity rather than mere numbers -- government by adding machine. Besides, has a filibuster ever prevented eventual enactment of anything significant that an American majority has desired, strongly and protractedly?”
 
As is the tendency of legislators in high dudgeon, a corollary of the indignation of Democrats on Capitol Hill was a failure to consider how this principle would play out when they were on the other side of the gun.  Now might be the time to incubate that concern.  For it turns out that a majority of Americans do have a new desire – one that is actually growing stronger with protraction.  That desire is to see ObamaCare repealed.
 
A Rasmussen Reports poll released earlier this week showed nearly two-thirds of Americans – 63 percent – calling for the wholesale repeal of the healthcare plan that the president and his liberal enablers pushed through Congress without the civic lubrication of a consenting electorate. Despite the fact that the plan has now been federal law for two months, this was far and away the greatest public opposition yet registered to its existence.
 
Given that health care reform has taken a back seat to European financial travails, near-miss terrorist attacks and a staggering oil spill in the Gulf Coast in the interim, how is it that its popularity is continuing to erode? As this columnist predicted in January:
 
“If [Democrats] pass reform through unsavory means, the country will explode in a fit of populist rage that will make the last year pale in comparison.  The closest analog may be the 1824 presidential election, when John Quincy Adams entered the White House based on an alleged backroom deal with Speaker of the House Henry Clay.  The defeated Andrew Jackson and his supporters denounced the move as a “corrupt bargain” and campaigned on it for the next four years, paralyzing Adams’ presidency and turning the White House over to Jackson in 1828. This outcome would give Republicans the moral superiority necessary to campaign for ObamaCare’s outright repeal rather than more moderate course corrections – and it would also likely double the number of Democratic congressional seats in danger.”
 
I hate to say I told you so. 
 
The front lines of the forward offensive for repeal are being manned by 20 state attorneys general who want federal courts to rule on the issue of whether ObamaCare’s individual mandate to purchase insurance is based on an excessive interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause. At least a dozen other less-visible lawsuits are also in the works.  There is no doubt that this will be an uphill battle.  But it’s one in which the stakes have just been dramatically raised.
 
Enterprising minds in the conservative legal movement have found a potentially fatal flaw in the over 2,400-page health care legislation.  It seems that in the haste with which the bill was constructed and passed, lawmakers made a dramatic oversight: apparently, they failed to insert a severability clause, the standard issue device that ensures that if a section of the law is found unconstitutional, the rest will remain binding.  Thus, if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional, the rest of health care reform will go down with it.
 
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi famously said that the health care bill would have to be passed to find out what was in it. How right that notion has proved to be.