Groundhog Day for Sens. Hatch, Alexander on health insurance mandate

Sen. Orrin Hatch, would-be king of the teabaggers. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) don't care if the Supreme Court declared the health insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act constitutional. They don't care that Mitt Romney, running on a platform of repealing Obamacare, was shellacked in November. They don't care that they're tilting at windmills. They only, apparently, care about feeding the teabagger beast.

Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch (UT) and Lamar Alexander (TN) re-introduced legislation Tuesday that would eliminate the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate.

'This legislation we are introducing today is simple: it strikes the individual mandate, so we can instead find ways of providing people with health care, but in a manner that doesn't run counter to our constitutional framework of limited government,' Hatch said in a statement.

Why Hatch is in on this is a bit of a mystery. He just won reelection and doesn't have to worry about holding off a teabagger challenge for another six years. Alexander, however, is up in 2014 and obviously feels the need to stave off the extremists. Maybe Hatch is just along for moral support. Or maybe it's just his nature to be an asshole.