Here's an excerpt from an interview Rolling Stone's Douglas Brinkley conducted with President Obama.
What made you so certain that the law was constitutional?
It's hard to dispute that health care is a national issue of massive importance. It takes up 17 or 18 percent of our entire economy; it touches on everybody's lives; it is a massive burden on businesses, on our federal budget and on families. It's practiced across state lines. So the notion that Congress could not take a comprehensive approach to that problem the way we have makes no sense. ...Rolling Stone
All of this has been discussed and disputed endlessly. But the way Obama phrased it made me think about how we would behave -- how we would expect our Congress to act -- if there were a single epidemic killing as many people as the lack of health care kills.
We'd act immediately. We'd expect the willing involvement of our businesses, our federal revenues, our political representatives, our families. We wouldn't screw around with states' rights and assertions that the president was a communist for wanting a nationwide response to the epidemic of health problems.
An epidemic of failures isn't something you turn into a political circus. And yet that's what the Republicans did and continue to do. ...hope to do again!
