The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

Our younger readers–those who were born yesterday–may not remember when delayingObamaCare was considered a wild idea, its exponents limited to crazy right-wing terrorists. Times have certainly changed since–oh, the beginning of this week.

“Democrats facing difficult reelection campaigns in 2014–Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Begich of Alaska–came out on Wednesday evening in support of extending the open enrollment period of the law, as first proposed by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who is also up for reelection in 2014,” Politico reports. All these senators were elected or re-elected in 2008, when Barack Obamatopped the ticket. …

So now Democrats–and even the administration itself, ever so incrementally, are embracing the idea of saving ObamaCare by delaying the individual mandate. But that is unlikely to be sufficient, and could even make matters worse. Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle argues that it “solves a problem for individuals but destabilizes the insurance market as a whole”:

If it’s a tedious pain to buy insurance, the only thing standing between us and a death spiral is the fairly hefty penalty that folks who don’t buy it may have to pay. Delaying the individual mandate makes the problems created by the malfunctioning exchanges worse–which, I reiterate, will ultimately mean more uninsured people, not fewer. This is a terrible idea, which is being seized upon by the administration and Republicans not because it makes any sense, but because it is politically expedient.

The individual mandate tax can indeed be a “fairly hefty penalty.” It isn’t just $95, as that Politico piece asserted, but $95 or 1% of income, whichever is higher. (Both the minimum and the rate are set to rise, reaching $695 or 2.5% in 2016.) McArdle concludes: “If we’re going to delay, then we need to delay the whole thing–guaranteed issue, community rating and so forth. Otherwise, we’re just asking for, well, a quagmire.” Hey, Megan, your lips to Obama’s ears.

Whether not delaying the mandate will be sufficient to avert a quagmire is a different question, and color us skeptical on that one. For one thing, for political reasons the authors of the ObamaCare law made the mandate less than fully enforceable, as Avik Royexplained in an August Forbes piece:

Section 1501(g)(2) of the Affordable Care Act specifies that the IRS cannot subject taxpayers to “any criminal prosecution or penalty” for refusing to pay the mandate fine. Also, in contrast to normal tax levies, the IRS cannot “file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty imposed by this section.”

Basically, the only thing the IRS can do to make you pay the mandate fine is to take it out of your withholding, or withhold it from your tax refund, if you’re due one. So if you don’t participate in the withholding process, the IRS has no way to collect the mandate fine.

To put it another way, if you owe the IRS money when you file your return, you can’t be penalized if you decline to pay any amount of the debt up to the mandate tax. How much of an obstacle this is isn’t clear. Presumably the IRS will develop countermeasures to increase subsequent years’ withholding when a taxpayer avoids the mandate. And perhaps organizing one’s finances so as to avoid the mandate will be too complicated for most taxpayers. Then again, it’s not as if getting insurance from HealthCare.gov is simple.

And therein lies perhaps a greater challenge to the mandate’s viability. If people can’t buy insurance because the government failed to fulfill its promise of making it available, taxing them for lacking insurance violates basic fairness. If the ObamaCare website is nonfunctional in another month, calls to delay the mandate will be much harder to resist–and, as we’ve seen, they already aren’t that easy to resist.

Further, as we’ve written, it seems to us there’s a legal case to be made that the tax is, or soon will be, unconstitutional. A law that taxes individuals for failing to purchase an unavailable product fails even the relatively undemanding “rational basis” test. …

As recently as Monday, the president himself was delivering a “narrative” about the wonders of ObamaCare. Now he’s delaying from behind, bowing ever so slightly to reality. But the gap between the administration’s narrative has continued to widen. It will keep doing so absent a sudden, and in our view wholly unexpected, display of competence.

So senators who face difficult election battles in 2014 suddenly want to take an issue away from their opponents. In other words, keeping your job is now more important than following your party and president. That is the direct result of government that is too large and does too much, and politicians that are paid too much.