As I note here, implementing the new health care reform law will provide conservatives with plenty of opportunities to fear monger about health care reform, but this new scandal about Congressional staffers being exempt from enrolling in the exchanges certainly isn’t one of them. Currently, the health care law requires members and their staff to participate in the new health insurance exchanges, but Republicans are claiming that Democrats purposely excluded senior committee staffers from the mandate and will propose legislation to close the loophole:

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) announced Thursday in a “Dear Colleague” letter that he would be introducing bicameral legislation with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who tried to attach a similar amendment to the reform act and the reconciliation bill. The legislation would require all Congressional staffers — and top White House officials — to buy their health plans through state-run exchanges created in the act. Currently, the reform act could be interpreted to only require Members and the staffers in their personal offices to enter the exchange, according to a Congressional Research Service memo.

“Many of my colleagues and I believe that the expansion of government control over health care was the wrong approach to take,” Burgess, who is an obstetrician, writes in the letter. “Regardless, if Congress has decided it is the right thing for our constituents, then all Members and staff, as well as the President, Vice President, and political appointees, should be mandated to be covered by plans operating in an exchange.”

I (along with Dr. Mandy Mandy Krauthamer) once debated Burgess about health care reform and for the most part, we decided that he’s a fairly thoughtful individual. So this push to strengthen the requirement (see, Republicans do love mandates!) that staffers enroll in a state-based exchange is really beneath him. First of all, the offending language was drafted by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and incorporated into the bill during the HELP Committee’s mark up of reform legislation. Democrats accepted the amendment because they thought it would demonstrate how sincere they were about their efforts, but I remember thinking that the whole thing came over as a cheap political stunt. And I still do, particularly since Republicans are now exploiting their own legislative incompetency to manufacture another scandal.

This health care law is incremental and while it provides the insured with greater security, it’s not intended to separate employees from their employer-based coverage. Congressional staffers, like all federal employees, already participate in FEHBP, the exchange that inspired these exchanges and (were it not for this requirement) could enroll in the exchanges once they open to large employers. So this particular loophole scandal is something Republicans manufactured to hold them over until they find something else to sink their teeth into.

Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) admitted that he supported the individual mandate before he realized it was unconstitutional and now, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has conceded that he too endorsed a policy that would have allowed the government “to tell you what you have to buy, even if you don’t want to buy it.” In 1993, Hatch, along with 20 other GOP senators — including Grassley, Bennett, and Bond — introduced a health care plan that would have required everyone to buy coverage, capped awards for medical malpractice lawsuits, established minimum benefit packages and invested in comparative effectiveness research. It was, in other words, a plan to “erode liberty.”

Last night, and then again this afternoon, Hatch was pressed on his past support for the 1993 proposal. What’s changed, CNN’s Campbell Brown and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell both wanted to know. Like Grassley, Hatch couldn’t come up with a very good answer. In 1993, Republicans hastily proposed the unconstitutional measure to fend off HillaryCare; nobody even understood the implications of the alternative policy, Hatch explained:

HATCH: Well, it really wasn’t. We were fighting Hillarycare at that time. And I don’t think anyone centered on it, I certainly didn’t. That was 17 years ago. But since then, and with the advent of this particular bill, really seeing how much they’re depending on an unconstitutional approach to it, yea, naturally I got into it, got into it on this issue.

Watch it:

Hatch was one of the first lawmakers to argue that the individual mandate was unconstitutional — railing against the provision during the Senate Finance Committee’s mark up of — and his conversion highlights the radicalization of the Republican party and the frivolous nature of the mandate challenges. The point has been made before that the health care law Obama signed on Tuesday resembles the 1993 Republican alternative and is far more conservative than anything Ted Kennedy or even Bill Clinton proposed in the past. The fact that Republicans are willing to embarrass themselves by walking away from ideas they’ve championed reveals everything you need to know about the sincerity of their present campaign.