Ed Schultz Unfamiliar With Widely-Read Document Known as the Bill of Rights
Even though Ed Schultz has been told by MSNBC to refrain from further “Psycho Talk” segments, no such restraint is evident on his radio show, one of the top rated for liberals in the country. On Wednesday, for example, Schultz criticized former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for signing a bill into law in 2006 that includes an individual mandate for Bay State residents to buy health insurance, a provision also included in last year's health bill passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. Schultz played two clips of Romney, from 2009 and earlier this week on “Good Morning America,” talking about the individual mandate, followed by Schultz's criticism ( audio ) — SCHULTZ: Have you noticed the flip-flops that's been taking place in the conservative movement about health care reform, how the mandate was about the best thing since sliced bread when they came up with it back in the early '90s. We ran a montage of the sound bites and the lists of those on the conservative agenda who were in favor of the mandate and now all of a sudden, since it's been passed under a Democratic House and Senate and presidency, all of a sudden they're against it and it's a government takeover of health care and a job-crushing Washington takeover. That's their latest. But you don't have to look very far, you've got Mitt Romney here, number 7 there fellas (referring to audio clip), in 2009, Romney saying that what he had done in Massachusetts really should have been a model for the entire country. ROMNEY (source not cited): Massachusetts is a model for getting everybody insured in a way that doesn't break the bank and that doesn't put the government into the driver's seat and allows people to own their own insurance policies and not to have to worry about losing coverage. That's what Massachusetts did. SCHULTZ: That was the Mittster in 2009. This is the Mittster just yesterday. ROMNEY (on “GMA” with George Stephanopoulos): We are a federalist system. We don't need the federal government imposing a one-size-fits-all plan on the entire nation. STEPHANOPOULOS: But what he (US District Judge Roger Vinson of Northern District of Florida, who ruled that individual mandate in Obamacare unconstitutional) was talking about specifically was this requirement that people buy health insurance and you had exactly that same requirement in Massachusetts. Why is it right for a state to impose that kind of a mandate and not the federal government? ROMNEY: Well, states have rights that the federal government doesn't have. Under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, the powers of the federal government
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on February 5, 2011. Filed under