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Tales from the Health Care Debate

- May 4, 2010

A student of mine was an intern for a member of Congress this semester. The member (hereafter, “MC”) was considered a swing vote on health care and ultimately supported it. In her paper about this internship, she told a few stories:

bq. [The phone calls] became so intense about a week before the vote that we set up a voice recording that everyone had to go through, saying “Please press one if you would like [MC] to hear your opinion on healthcare”…The voice mailbox would get full every 20 minutes or so…

bq. …Someone made a bingo sheet of all the phrases that callers were using…The squares included Obamacare, shoving/ramming it down our throats, unconstitutional, Congress is a bunch of idiots, that Pelosi woman, look at what happened in Massachusetts (referring to the election of Scott Brown), backroom deals, socialism, and government takeover. Communism wasn’t even included; we heard it so often it was a free space.

bq. …I could no longer sit idly when one man asked me to point out the section in the Constitution that allowed the government to do something like this. I responded, “Well, sir, it’s the necessary and proper clause and it’s in Article I of the Constitution.” He became irate and screamed that I was a “socialist bitch” before hanging up.