Who Sabotaged ObamaCare?
...The idea that Republicans have "sabotaged" ObamaCare is ludicrous on its face. Sabotage entails destroying or damaging something by subverting it--by stealthily undermining it from within. Republican opposition to ObamaCare has been neither stealthy nor "within." Every Republican member of Congress has opposed ObamaCare consistently, openly and honorably....

...In the spring of 2011, CMS staffers "struggled . . . to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as 'concepts of operation,' " which would have shown what a federal exchange would "look like." The White House balked for fear that "Republicans might reprise a tactic from the 1990s of then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who mockingly brandished intricate charts created by a task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton." Instead, the White House ordered CMS "to praise early work on those state exchanges that matched the hidden federal thinking."

At about the same time, some states were indicating that they intended to exercise their option under ObamaCare to opt out of starting their own exchanges. "The more states in the federal exchange, the more complex [would be] the task of building it," note Goldstein and Eilperin. But in bidding out the contract to create the federal exchange, the White House "would not let this fact be included in the specifications" because they were afraid "Republicans would seize on it as evidence of a feared federal takeover of the health-care system."...

...This is in part a story of political incompetence and hubris. Obama and his allies in Congress were unable to win a single Republican vote--and it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a monstrously complicated law enacted by a slender partisan majority might prove especially difficult to implement. As Obama himself admitted yesterday in a rare truthful statement: "Now, let's face it, a lot of us didn't realize that passing the law was the easy part."...