Voters in Missouri, in a statewide ballot referendum known as "Proposition C" "overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance, rebuking President Barack Obama's administration and giving Republicans their first political victory in a national campaign to overturn the controversial health care law passed by Congress in March," reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The paper says the voters rejected the mandate, and passed Proposition C, by a "ratio of nearly 3 to 1," despite more than $300,000 in spending by the Missouri Hospital Association in support of the ObamaCare mandate.
Look, we have a representative republic rather than a plebiscitary democracy, and sometimes the unpopular thing to do is the right thing to do. George W. Bush's Iraq War was unpopular in Berkeley, Calif., and plenty of federal civil rights measures were unpopular among Southern whites. Maybe some day the people of Missouri will be thanking President Obama for their cheap and high-quality health care the same way that the Berkeley City Council is thanking President Bush for liberating Iraq and Southern whites are thanking the Supreme Court and the Nixon administration for ending segregation. Maybe. The alternative is that voters will make the politicians pay somehow.
