“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged her colleagues to back a major overhaul of U.S. health care even if it threatens their political careers, a call to arms that underscores the issue’s massive role in this election year.

“Lawmakers sometimes must enact policies that, even if unpopular at the moment, will help the public, Pelosi said in an interview being broadcast Sunday the ABC News program ‘This Week.’

“‘We’re not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress,’ she said. ‘We’re here to do the job for the American people.'”

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ALEXANDER: …[T]he difference here is that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate — it would really be the end of the United States Senate as a protector of minority rights, as a place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority, and it would be a political kamikaze mission for the Democratic Party if they jam this through after the American people have been saying, look, we’re trying to tell you in every way we know how, in elections, in surveys, in town hall meetings, we don’t want this bill.

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“‘Bipartisanship is a two-way street,’ House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declares in an interview airing Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

“‘But let me say this,’ Pelosi continues, ‘The bill can be bipartisan, even though the votes might not be bipartisan, because they [Republicans] have made their imprint on this.'”

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