No, Ben Nelson didn't scuttle the ACA's federal exchange

[Update, 1/29/15: As Jonathan Cohn reports, Nelson has just precisely confirmed the reading below of his position re federal and state exchanges.]

The latest bit of sophistry deployed by Halbig supporters to convince the world that the Senate Democrats who drafted the ACA deliberately barred subsidies from flowing through any exchange set up by the federal government is a claim that "Ben Nelson made them do it," Here's David Catron in The American Spectator (retailed without value-add by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto):

Jonathan Cohn advises his New Republic readers, “Like other journalists who were following the process closely, I never heard any of them suggest subsidies would not be available in states where officials decided not to operate their own marketplaces.”

This is an odd statement indeed considering that high-profile publications were reporting a lively debate over this very issue. And Ben Nelson’s name was frequently mentioned. In January of 2010, for example, Politico reported that he regarded federal control of Obamacare’s exchanges as “a dealbreaker.” Nelson said that too much federal involvement would inevitably lead to government-run health care: “I wouldn’t support something that would start us down the road of federal regulation of insurance and a single-payer plan.”

He reiterated his objection to federal exchanges in this 2010 video, wherein Greta Van Susteran presses him to provide a legitimate motive for ultimately voting in favor of health care “reform.” Nelson vehemently insists that no one bought his vote: “I had requirements… no government-run plan, no federal exchange… and adequate language to deal with abortion. Those were requirements, but no one was buying any vote.” Nelson clearly implies that these conditions had been met and this is why he flip-flopped and voted for the bill.

These statements prove nothing, and indicate nothing.There was precisely zero public debate over whether the Senate bill allowed a federal exchange to credit subsidies. Catron strips the context out of the Politico article, which in fact indicates the opposite of what Catron and Taranto imply.

Writhing out of Norquist's embrace, part III

Grover Norquist is insisting on his bond with the trio of conservative Senators that have begun negotiations on a comprehensive tax/budget reform deal. But Chambliss/Coburn/Crapo are looking for a "pound of flesh/not one drop of blood" loophole.

Shakespeare's merchant had a perfect legal right to claim a pound of flesh from Antonio, who had pledged it to him if he could not repay his debt on time. But Shylock, it was decreed in court,  had no more right than anyone else to shed blood.

In the past two days, Chambliss and Coburn have argued, in effect, that while they promised never to raise taxes, they did not promise to reduce the United States to insolvency. To reduce the deficit to a manageable level, "“We’ve got to close the revenue gap," as Chambliss put it on Monday. 

First, though, they've got to close the rhetoric gap, embodied in Norquist's no-new-taxes pledge. To recap: when reports broke that the conservative 3Cs were working with three Democratic counterpart on a bipartisan budget deal that would include some combination of spending cuts and revenue increases, Norquist sent an open letter reminding them of their pledge never to raise taxes. As I noted at the time,  CCC's carefully-worded response promised to lower marginal rates but most pointedly did not promise that offsetting those reductions by closing or reducing various tax breaks would not result in a net increase in revenue. The letter pitted the "special interests" who would lose tax breaks in an imagined future deal against  the 'taxpayers' whom they were pledged to protect. What it did not note is that most of us are both (see: Chambliss, Coburn, Crapo to Norquist: Kowtow or brush-off?)