Lighten up, Francis...

An Oklahoma legislator wants to go a step beyond repealing the national Patient Affordable Care Act, commonly called "Obamacare."

State Rep. Mike Ritze, a Broken Arrow Republican, would like to see the law made a criminal offense in Oklahoma, subjecting people who try to enforce it to fines, imprisonment and a felony record. I myself do not think the health care reform act passed in 2010 will do the one thing that I believe nearly everyone agrees needs to happen -- lower health care costs. I've elsewhere said that the manner in which the country's legislative leadership sneaked around parliamentary procedures and questionably employed their own operating rules was repulsive, even if the legislation itself is only a misguided attempt to fix a real problem by taking steps likely to make it worse.

So I won't cry many tears when it's finally repealed, hamstrung by defunding or otherwise torpedoed and steps can be taken that will be more likely to drive down insurance and health care costs. But making the enforcement of a federal law a state felony? Really? Rep. Ritze says other states have already passed such laws and if so, more power to them, but the whole scheme seems pretty much like lawsuit bait.

And I can't say it would set a really great precedent even if it stands. What if one of our bluer states -- say, Massachusetts, for example -- decided that it wanted to make military recruitment a felony within its state borders? Should Rep. Ritze's law be passed and should it stand up to legal challenges, it would be that much harder to argue against Massachusetts' right to take such action if its people wanted that done.

In the end, I doubt this measure will succeed. But it's a very good example of why we might not always desire too much efficiency in government. The slower they work, the greater chance that wacky ideas will founder on some common sense.