Meet Roland Burris. He's the corrupt Illinois politician who was appointed to Barack Obama's senate seat when Obama became president. Like Obama, he was a diversity hire, and like the president (see June 4 and April 18 blog posts) he has a little bit of trouble with basic facts.
Burris recently told an interviewer that Congress is authorized to force everyone to buy health insurance by the Constitution. This suprising bit of Constitutional intepretation comes from Burris' understanding that Constitution authorizes the federal government (in Burris' words) "to provide for the health, welfare and defense of the country."
In fact, the word "health" is nowhere in the Constitution. The preamble reads: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America."
It's scary that Illinois would put a guy in the Senate whose understanding of the Constitution would get him flunked out of law school.
You can read the whole shoddy interview here.
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