Leadership Quote by Bill McCollum

“Clearly violates” is doing the heavy lifting here: it’s a courtroom adverb smuggled into a press-release sentence, designed to turn a policy fight into an emergency. Bill McCollum isn’t just disagreeing with health care reform; he’s trying to delegitimize it in advance, pre-loading the public argument with the language of inevitability. If something “clearly” violates the Constitution, then debate becomes beside the point and resistance starts to look like civic duty.

The real target is federal power. By pairing “U.S. Constitution” with “each state’s sovereignty,” McCollum invokes two American sacred objects at once, fusing them into a single grievance: Washington is not merely overreaching, it’s trespassing. That framing is strategic because it shifts the battlefield from costs, coverage, and outcomes (where reformers can cite data and human stories) to jurisdiction (where opponents can cite principle and rally identities). It also sets up the legal posture that would soon define the Obamacare era: attorneys general positioning themselves as guardians of the states against a coercive center.

Context matters: this is late-2009/early-2010 politics, with the House moving ahead on a massive, complicated bill and conservative energy surging into what would become the Tea Party moment. McCollum’s line is calibrated for that mood - distrust of elites, anxiety about mandates, and a hunger for bright-line constitutional rhetoric. The subtext is not subtle: if the federal government can compel participation in health insurance, what can’t it compel? Whether that slippery slope is persuasive is beside the point. As messaging, it’s a clean, mobilizing translation of policy into identity and federalism into outrage.