Best of Right Opinion

• Jeff Jacoby: Scrap the ObamaCare Mandate
• Erick Erickson: We Live in Roman Times
• Ed Feulner: Crowding Out Compassion
• Burt Prelutsky: Impeach Trump, and Then What?
• Michael Barone: Merkel — and Davos — Rebuked in Germany

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Jeff Jacoby: “Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, repeatedly opposed her party’s attempts this year to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But doing away with the ACA’s individual mandate, a change included in tax-reform legislation being readied by Senate Republicans, is a different matter. ‘I have always supported the freedom to choose,’ Murkowski wrote in an op-ed for the Daily News-Miner in Fairbanks. ‘I believe that the federal government should not force anyone to buy something they do not wish to buy, in order to avoid being taxed.’ Murkowski’s positions — unwilling to kill Obamacare but very willing to kill the individual mandate — put her squarely in the mainstream. The individual mandate, unfair and ineffective, has always been the most disliked feature of the law, and not just by Republicans. From the outset, Americans across the spectrum resented the notion that the federal government could order citizens to buy something they didn’t want — not as a condition to doing something, the way auto insurance is required for those who wish to drive a car on public roads, but simply for being alive. … You can be a liberal Democrat committed to affordable health insurance for everyone and still be against an individual mandate. That was Barack Obama’s original position, and he reiterated it often during his 2008 campaign. … It was a good argument then; it’s an even better argument now.”