Political Quotes

“Mr. President, the Founding Fathers set up a system of government which intentionally made social change in this country hard to achieve. They set up a pretty complicated legislative process with an innovative bicameral legislature in which you have to get the exact same bill with the exact same text passed through two different Chambers. They set up courts that could overturn those laws if they didn't abide by the Constitution. They set up an office down the street in the White House with a veto power that could cancel out actions of the majoritarian legislature. Then they built in pretty frequent elections so that if people didn't like what happened here, they could change the composition of the legislature to try to get something different to happen. So I imagine that is why it took 100 years since Teddy Roosevelt first proposed that this country make a commitment to universal health care that we actually got here. All the while, we watched as every other industrialized nation in the world decided that the compassionate thing to do was to make sure people didn't die because they didn't have enough money to get into the health care system, and they committed themselves to universal health care while the United States sat on the sideline.…”