From Special Report with Bret Baier | Wednesday March 28, 2012

On whether heath care reform can stand if its individual mandate is struck down:

I think not, because the individual mandate is so central to the act that if you take it out what is left is distorted. Without the mandate, you don’t have a funding source for the entire healthcare system… one-sixth of the economy. If you take it out, there is no way the insurers can provide what they have to provide under the other provisions of the law….

On the law’s new Medicaid mandates:

The word for what the federal government is threatening — removing [every dollar] from all Medicaid funding, including Medicaid assistance that predates Obamacare — is extortion. And that is coercion by the federal government.
The essence of Obamacare and the reason it’s being so challenged constitutionally is because it is such an overextension of the power of the central government in every area. The mandate [to purchase health insurance] is against the individual, but [with Medicaid] it’s against the states.
It’s [the federal government is] establishing itself as supreme. If it can order an individual to enter into a contract is there any limit to what the federal government can do? The answer is no.
If it can so threaten the states after it’s been baiting and switching on them for half a century on Medicaid… it’s now a huge element of every state government. If the feds withdraw the money, the states are in terrible trouble. They have no choice. It is extortion. And that is why I think the plaintiffs have a strong case.

On opening events of President Obama’s reelection campaign:

They’ve got their line down on Romney, the out-of-touch plutocrat who cares not about the ordinary American.
The problem is that… Obama has his own out-of- touchness issue. In 2008 it worked in a sense because he was a spectacular stranger who came out of nowhere and that kind of coolness and detachment was attractive and it added to his charisma.
That is all over now. That hope and change stuff is done.
And now looking at him as a president who has a record, he has this kind of detachment and coolness which I think also edges onto the side of being cold. So I’m not sure that, if it’s a competition of who is the fuzzier and cuddlier candidate, that the other side will win.
It’s a tie on that. And in the end it [the outcome] will [depend] on policies.

On whether there are any graceful ways for the trailing Republican candidates to leave the race:

There are elegant ways [to exit], but nobody is going to do it.