Once upon a time in America ...

Let's free associate. Let's suppose that Mitt Romney, who you will recall ran for president in 2008, was nominated and defeated Barack Obama four years ago.

And let's also suppose that, as President Romney took office in 2009, the Republicans had won control of both houses of Congress. Now that we've got the stage set, let's assume that immediately after taking office, President Romney announced that the enactment of health care reform would be his top priority.

He tells the nation that health care costs have become so staggeringly and uncontrollably high that reform is necessary to prevent the soaring costs of Medicare and Medicaid from bankrupting the nation. He tells the nation that we can no longer permit 50 million Americans to go without health insurance, and so he will propose to cover 30 million of them.

And most importantly, President Romney tells the nation that his initiative will be modeled after the program he enacted as governor of Massachusetts. At its heart will be the individual mandate.

In order to dispel skepticism among Republicans, who had expected that fixing the nation's economic mess would take center stage, President Romney reminds them that his program with the individual mandate as its centerpiece had come from conservative thinkers. After all, it was Mark Pauly, a conservative economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who had devised the individual mandate as the alternative to the Democrats and their obsession with a single-payer health care system.

Not long after Pauly advanced the individual mandate, Stuart Butler at the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's premier conservative think tanks, began to push the mandate with Republicans. For them it was the perfect free-market alternative to the Democrats' addiction to big-government solutions.

But rather than develop a bill to do just that and submit it to Congress, the president hands the job off to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner. McConnell and Boehner, both partisan lawmakers, quickly decide to write the bill to their own liking in anticipation that they could secure the votes to pass it. The Democrats predictably are radicalized in their opposition to the bill and to a process that excludes them.

The enactment of health care reform is by definition complex and controversial. But President Romney's withdrawal from the field of battle coupled with McConnell's and Boehner's "my way or the highway" approach turns the passage of the legislation into all-out war.

Fifteen months later, President Romney signs the bill into law. Not a single Democrat has voted for it. It's grown to more than 2,500 pages in length, and nobody understands it. Its real costs are disguised by frontloading the revenues and backloading the costs. Soon it will have more than 10,000 pages of federal regulations.

Town hall meetings held by members of Congress to explain the new program to their constituents turn into screaming matches among those who love or hate a bill they don't understand. The nation is torn in half.

And very shortly after it becomes law, the inevitable happens. More than 20 states file suit, claiming the individual mandate is unconstitutional. The heart of their complaint is that the individual mandate, which will force the American public to purchase health insurance or face stiff fines imposed by the federal government, is an unconstitutional exercise of power based on the Constitution's Commerce Clause. The suits argue that Romneycare, as it has come to be known, is proposing to create an economic market and then compel individual Americans to enter that market or face hefty federal penalties. They assert that Romneycare will profoundly and destructively alter the relationship between the federal government and the people.

Ultimately, the cases reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The four liberal justices mount a full-throated assault on the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate during an unprecedented three days of oral arguments before the high court. Justice Stephen Breyer's questions indicate that, while he sees no constitutional problem with funding health care through a well-established single-payer system like Medicare, he worries that the individual mandate stretches the federal reach of the Commerce Clause to and beyond the breaking point.

On the other hand, Justice Antonin Scalia and the other three conservative justices argue just the opposite. If single-payer Medicare is constitutional, then surely so, too, is the individual mandate. Moreover, they inferentially raise the specter that striking the individual mandate amounts to activist judges legislating from the bench.

There you have it. The folks we put in office to lead, and it makes no difference whether they're Democrats or Republicans, won't work together. Once upon a time in America, it was not like this. It's way past time to purge the incumbents — all of them.

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