President Barack Obama appeared Thursday before a noisy and enthusiastic crowd in Largo, MD, and made fun of Republicans' dire predictions of doom about the Affordable Care Act. He notably dinged one Republican congressman who declared that "Obamacare" is as evil and unjust a law as 1850's Fugitive Slave Act, which asserted the rights of a slave-owner to reclaim an escaped slave, even if that person had run to territory where slavery was illegal.
The president was addressing the crowd at Prince George Community College when he said, "The fact is that the Republicans' biggest fear at this point isn't that the Affordable Care Act will fail. What they're worried about is that it's going to succeed."
“Just the other day, one Republican in Congress said we need to shut this thing down before the marketplaces open and people get to see that they’ll be getting coverage, and getting these subsidies because -- and I’m going to quote him here, he said ‘It’s going to prove almost impossible to undo Obamacare.' So, in other words, we’ve got to shut this thing down before people find out that they like it," Obama said. "That's a strange argument."
He went on to make fun of the apocalyptic tone some Republicans have taken in warning of the catastrophic outcomes that will befall the country should the law go into effect.
“You had a state representative, somewhere, say that it’s as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act,” said the president. “Think about that. Affordable health care is worse than a law that let slave owners get their runaway slaves back.”
Obama was referring to New Hampshire Republican candidate for Congress Bill O'Brien, who said, "And what is Obamacare? It is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that allowed slave owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African Americans and use the federal courts to take them back to slave states.”
Watch the video, embedded below via HD News:
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