HERE COME THE BACHMANN WANNABES

On the question of how much the right is going to to resist the health care legislation if it passes, Aimai and I very much disagree (see, e.g., the comments here). I'm not sure how it's going to play out, by I see that Michelle Bachmann isn't going to be entirely on her own in calling for defiance of the law.

Also pledging resistance is a low-level but somewhat connected wingnut, John Hood. Hood is the president and chairman of the John Locke Foundation, a right-wing think tank based in North Carolina and partly funded by Art Pope, who's also a director of Americans for Prosperity, which organized the tea parties that took place last April 15. Mr. Hood writes this on the Locke Foundation site:

I Will Not Comply

... There is no conceivable way that the president or the leaders of Congress can legally enact their legislative monstrosity.

Instead, they are going to cheat.

They are going to employ some kind of legislative trickery to pretend to pass a bill that, they now realize, will never become law through constitutional means....

I don't know about the rest of you, but i"m not planning to recognize such a result as legally binding. I'm not going to pretend to obey any dictates from federal health-care bureaucrats that have never been authorized by a constitutional vote of both houses of Congress. I will not submit to any extra-constitutional order to dismantle the consumer-driven health plan I have set up for my employees.

I will not comply. If the government tries to make me comply, I'll sue. And I’ll win.

This is not (yet) a banana republic where constitutions are seen as inconvenient impediments to the rule of the despot. This is not (yet) a European-style welfare state where some powerful parliament can exercise legislative, executive, and judicial power all in one stroke....

If they command the rest of us to pretend they have passed the bill, I will not comply.

You shouldn't, either.

Maybe nobody truly prominent is going to have the cojones to do this. Maybe the lawsuits, if there are any, are going to seem as crazy as birther lawsuits.

But the Locke Foundation is regarded as legit -- very much so -- by the North Carolina media. The Web site is slick and serious. National Review calls the Locke Foundation "one of the most effective state-level think tanks in the country."

I think there's going to be a lot of this.

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ON THE OTHER HAND: The anti-HCR crowd doesn't seem to be turning out a hell of a lot of protesters. There were a lot of phone calls to Congress, however (pro-HCR and con).