I always make the mistake of reading the comments after pieces like that. Damn, the stupid is itchy.
JonRowe
2983
What this really has shown us is how ridiculously loyal the republican party has become. I mean jeeze, you have a bill that has been so watered down to the point that is basically just guaranteeing that more people will have insurance and go to the doctor more often, and basically have more freedom in choosing healthcare plans, and they hate it.
Isn’t your party supposed to be the one that likes people being more fiscally responsible?
But dude, you don’t understand, in most conservatives’ view, the very fact that people don’t already have a good job with great health care benefits is proof of their shiftlessness and unworthiness. If the public helps them out with health care that they haven’t had the prudence and self-denial to make provision for ahead of time, what will their incentive be to better themselves? I have a Republican friend who really thinks this way. It’s the “moral hazard” objection to the financial industry bailouts, but instead of applied to rich-ass Wall Street guys who made up a bunch of exotic financial instruments that they should have known would blow up in their faces, it’s applied to people who never had much money or opportunity, mostly.
Oooh, I get to link Donnor Party Conservatism again to support Papageno’s theory.
bago
2986
Given that “Obamacare” is basically a Bob Dole proposal, or Romneycare… I believe this informs the facts of the rhetoric.
In other words, facts be damned, did you get me a lobbying job next year?
Or do people not remember this?
"The truth is this is a Republican idea,’’ said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. She said she first heard the concept of the "individual mandate’’ in a Miami speech in the early 1990s by Sen. John McCain, a conservative Republican from Arizona, to counter the "Hillarycare’’ the Clintons were proposing.
McCain did not embrace the concept during his 2008 election campaign, but other leading Republicans did, including Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush.
Seeking to deradicalize the idea during a symposium in Orlando in September 2008, Thompson said, "Just like people are required to have car insurance, they could be required to have health insurance.’’
Among the other Republicans who had embraced the idea was Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts crafted a huge reform by requiring almost all citizens to have coverage.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/23/1544321/individual-health-insurance-mandate.html#ixzz0jAw2tanO
Jazar
2988
Sore losers that they are, Senate republicans are bringing the budget reconciliation bill back to the House. Great Scott!
GOP Forces New House Vote on Fixes to Health Bill
Ranulf
2989
And that same Miami Herald article mentions how Obama was against mandates during the 08 primaries. Polticians talking out of both sides of their mouths? No way! McCain, Dole and Romney’s support (boy has been trying to walk that back) of mandates/healthcare are why many conservatives don’t trust them or like them.
Reason article regarding the mandate:
YouWho
2990
I think it’s more of a general xenophobia. They really have a strong contempt for anything that is foreign to them, including things like compassion and evidence-based reasoning.
The main problem with the article, for me, is that I’m supposed to rely on one man’s interpretation of the Commerce Clause and he’s in bed with the Heritage Foundation. While what he has to say sounds reasonable on the face of it I’m really not all that trusting of ideologically motivated hired guns as a rule.
JonRowe
2992
Wait a minute wait a minute…
Is this budget reconciliation thing the same thing that the republicans were demonizing that the democrats could use to get the bill passed?
From the above article -
“This came after Rep. Tom Perriello’s (D-Va.) brother’s gas lines were cut, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) received death threats and Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) received a message saying snipers were being deployed to kill children of those who voted for health care overhaul.”
I don’t know, Rhino. Does threatening to murder someone’s children count, in your world? Is that something we should be allowed to get fucking upset about, do you think? Or should we wait until someone is actually dead? We wouldn’t want to upset the teabaggers, after all - they’re clearly barely clinging to the edge of sanity as it is.
WarrenM
2994
I imagine arrests will be coming soon. You can’t send out threatening faxes, cut gas lines and leave coffins around and not have the FBI find you. I mean, how many people have coffins laying around that they can just pick them up and leave on someone’s lawn? There’s a trail there.
Ultimately, the only reading of the Commerce Clause that means anything is the reading SCOTUS gives it. I’m betting they decline to even hear these cases, but if they do, I’m also betting they rule in favor of Congress.
On the face of it, the argument that “if people don’t buy health insurance, they have a tangible impact on the rest of the country when they seek health care which they can’t pay for, and so which gets paid for on the federal dime, and that impact crosses state lines” seems every bit as reasonable to me as most of the other Commerce Clause interpretations over the past 50 years. Personally I think the stretching of the Commerce Clause is a crock and needs to be curtailed, but given that it has already happened, the new regs seem to fit within it just fine.
<edit> just to be clear, and avoid a derailment: I support a strong central authority in government. I just think that stretching the Commerce Clause to accomplish things is the wrong way to go about it, must like interpreting the dependent clause of the 2nd amendment is a mess. I’d rather see the wording of other things stated more clearly, so that the Commerce Clause doesn’t need the abusing it has taken.
Apparently the coffin was left behind after a prayer vigil for the people health care will kill or something. False alarm.
Can someone more politically savvy tell me what, in a nutshell, the rupublicans (and the democrats) for that matter are doing in the senate right now. The news sites make it sound like they spent all day setting up and knocking down amendments just to get soundbites to use against democrats in the upcoming election (which is absurd to me, given that you’d think our legislators would have something more pressing to do, like, say, legislate…)
However, some of the proposed amendments seem completely reasonable. For example:
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, has proposed that drugs for erectile dysfunction, such as Viagra and Cialis, be prohibited to sex offenders.
So I’m assuming that rather than being completely stupid and voting against a republican amendment just because it’s an amendment, that something odd happens if the bill gets amended, and that’s what the democrats are trying to avoid?
In what universe is that reasonable?
Menzo
3000
What they were trying to avoid was having to amend the bill such that it has to go back to the House for a vote again.
Unfortunately there were a couple other, unrelated, reasons why this attempt failed. The bill has to go back to the House anyway, so I guess they could have avoided these “ugly” votes anyway.
Honestly, I don’t think the public is going to be fooled by this tactic. It’s seven long months until the election and an add showing a Senator voting against denying Viagra for criminals isn’t going to mean anything to people by then.
