That not fair. I doubt any of them are doing any fucking. Who wants to screw a wimpy, craven, and cowardly loser?
Jazar
1802
Wow. The Health Care Reform debate has already gone long enough. The more time it sits on “the back burner” the more people will get sick of hearing of it. Of course by then they’ll be denied coverage so the sickness will probably kill them.
What a ridiculous piece of goalpost-moving that is. And he also goes in for this all being the fault of Rush Limbaugh and friends, despite the fact that it’s conservative and in-the-pocket Democrats who are to blame for this mess. Screw that. Sometimes no deal is better than a bad deal, and make no mistake, a bad deal is what this is. If they pass this now or, even worse, after some further watering-down, these idiots will be clapping each other on the back from here to the time they lose their respective seats to whatever challengers the Republicans put up for their next election, and that will be the end of health care reform for most of our lifetimes.
I honestly don’t know what the Obama administration is thinking with this “let the dust settle” business, and I hardly trust their strategy so far with regard to this issue to believe it’s to do this, but scrapping this shitty plan and trying a more aggressive approach in six months or a year and at least making an earnest attempt to get something real done seems like a better idea to me than passing this half-measure and calling it a day.
Um, except now they won’t attempt it unless they have some sort of mythical 60 person majority, which will never happen again considering how badly they have bungled things.
I honestly don’t know what the Obama administration is thinking with this “let the dust settle” business, and I hardly trust their strategy so far with regard to this issue to believe it’s to do this, but scrapping this shitty plan and trying a more aggressive approach in six months or a year and at least making an earnest attempt to get something real done seems like a better idea to me than passing this half-measure and calling it a day.
They’ve 100% given up. They aren’t going to revisit it in 6 months or a year. It’s over. Probably until the system literally starts falling apart.
Jazar
1805
What difference will 6 months make? Republicans don’t want health care reform. This is Obama’s project that they want nothing more than to see fail (and it’s coming together better then anything John ‘Hannibal’ Smith could’ve planned). I don’t see the point in wasting any more time.
WarrenM
1806
Obama’s insistence on being nice to everyone is really what’s going wrong here. He just can’t seem to conceive of doing something that doesn’t have 100% buy-in from both sides.
I think Obama has a lofty goal of attempting to fix politics in the US and have legislation that both sides actually want and will be good for the country. Trying to me Mr. Smith going to Washington. Problem is most politicians don’t actually care about the state of the nation or about the political process and are just looking for money and power.
jeffd
1808
As I reflect on this - I think what disgusts me about the Democratic party is that there’s no reason for this capitulation.
I’m sure you all remember me defending the compromised version of healthcare the Senate passed. I wasn’t happy with the compromises, but I understood the need for them - you had to get to sixty; which means that anyone who’s willing to walk away (Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman) get what they want. It sucked, but what was there was better than nothing.
But now? There’s no reason for the House to give up on this. Politically it’s going to kill them - they’re still going to get slammed with the unpopularity of HCR in November, but they’re going to get the double whammy of having nothing of substance to show for the past year of negotiation. From a policy perspective - it’s worse than nothing. HCR will die for the next fifteen years, lots of people will suffer, incur terrible financial hardship, bankruptcy, and lots of people will die.
But because Martha Coakley was an epically bad candidate, Democrats are going to fold. That’s disgusting to me. If they can’t get anything done with the nearly unprecedented majorities they have right now, there’s no reason to continue supporting them. Keep a Democrat in the White House to prevent the GOP from doing truly awful things, but otherwise? Meh.
He could take a shot at trying to actually wrangle his Congress into doing something. Not that I think he will, and not that I think it would necessarily work, but he could at least try it.
It has nothing to do with what the Republicans want; if nothing else, I wish people would at least realize this much. Until Ted Kennedy died, the Democrats had sixty seats in the Senate. They were facing filibusters from members of their own caucus. This is entirely on them.
I’ll be clear, I don’t think that it would work six months or a year from now, but I do think that it’s more worth trying that than passing this thing, because if it doesn’t work then, it can be revisited ten or twenty years from now, instead of the sixty or eighty it will take if they pass these incremental reforms.
Yeah. It’s sad that the Republicans can’t be trusted to not be super villains, because I’d love to vote out the Democrats who’ve screwed us here, but I can’t without taking the chance that their replacements will just turn around and build a superweapon that controls the climate and use it to take the moon hostage. I’d still take that chance if I lived in Nevada, though; everything that needs to be said about Harry Reid’s unwillingness to apply any pressure whatsoever to get his ducks in a row can be summed up neatly with the phrase “Joe Lieberman is the chair of a Senate committee.”
As Krugman points out, the biggest disappointment here is Obama’s lack of leadership. It’s just mind-boggling that it’s gotten to this point.
Nate Silver has a good post today about Democrats and loss of hope amongst the base that seems like it might be a good fit for this thread.
Jazar
1813
Yes that was then. I’m talking about your 6 months from now scenario. Dems have 59 seats so if every blue dog somehow decided to finally tow the party line they would still not get the votes they need.
Fck is this maddening. Fcking timid, play-it-safe careerist assholes. You know that if the shoe were on the other foot a Republican House would have passed the Senate Bill and had it on the President’s desk the next day.
Mark my words, the failure to get this done and passed is going to blow back on them hard. If they had done the right thing, yeah, the Republicans would squawk, but there’d be an ACTUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT to point to, and the base would turn out. Now, not so much. It’s going to be 1994 all over again, dammit.
Yeah, well. This “filibuster everything” business is pretty much brand new, so I’m not so sure it works. If he could wrangle every Democrat, I’m not so sure he couldn’t also find one measly Republican who was at least willing to let the bill come to a vote. But we’ll never know if they never try.
Yep. All this crying over “only” having fifty-nine seats is going to get them is a bunch of voters saying “well, if you’re not going to get anything done with fifty-nine, you might as well only have forty-eight.” And they deserve it, too. And if this trend continues, and the Republicans control the entire government a decade from now and aren’t bashful about enacting whatever godawful policies they dream up, some of today’s Democrats will still be in Congress, and they’ll be tepidly blubbering about it, and it will have been their fault.
I’ve been thinking about this all day and it won’t be their fault. It’ll be our fault for not standing up and say enough with this back and forth pendulum of failure to govern. I don’t know what, but something needs to change, and it can’t be through putting faith in this system to self-correct.
I really don’t know what the hell to do at this point, honestly:
- 30% of the US public is completely crazy.
- The GOP completely refuses to play ball on anything. Their ruthless political tactics and effectiveness at turning the dials on the media make them extremely dangerous.
- US political institutions were rigged enough to start with. The new 60 vote supermajority required for anything makes it completely impossible to pass anything, except through reconciliation, which is limited and complicated.
Given that, it takes a completely ruthless approach to politics to get anything done - and what happens? The only Democrats who can get elected are apparently milquetoast cowards who back down as soon as the polls go down or they lose an election.
JeffL
1819
When exactly did 60 become required to get anything done? Since the Democrats came into power? No one has had 60 seats for what, 40 years? Reagan, Clinton, Bush, all managed to get big programs through with less than 60.
I hear and part of me believes that the Democrats have to have at LEAST 60 seats to pass anything, but I also wonder how much they fall back on that crutch as an excuse for their political ineptitude. ESPECIALLY since they currently need ZERO votes in the Senate to get the Health Care Reform passed, and still can’t/won’t pass it.
Is it really impossible for them to figure out how to cut a couple of Republicans from the herd and find ways to pressure them into voting their way? Are they really incapable of framing a bill in a way that would make it so popular that it would be political suicide for some GOP Senator to vote against it? A big part of the problem with the HCR was that they did absolutely nothing to sell it effectively. You’re talking about a bill in which you should be able to frame it such that anyone voting against would be voting against preventing families from going bankrupt due to the mother or child getting cancer; voting against it would be voting against the poor woman who is denied coverage for her breast cancer because she forgot to put, on the form she filled out 20 years ago, that she had acne treatment; voting against it is voting against some family who lost their job in this horrible market being able to afford health insurance; and on and on and on. The DNC should have been bombarding key states with TV ads tugging at heartstrings with actual families whose lives have been destroyed by these problems, and then a simple statement of how the HCR bill would prevent that from ever happening again in this country, and telling them how to tell their Senator “No More.” Then force some poor Republican from a moderate state try to say he’s against it. For all the “unity” in the Republican party, they’re just like every other Senator - they will do what is required to keep their seat in the Senate; they will not intentionally lose their seat just to take one for the party.
But instead all we heard from the Democrats was infighting over who to tax to pay for it, how they didn’t want to piss off the unions, etc. They completely lost - no, they never even seemed to try to take - the PR war. So it was completely safe for every Republican to vote against it.
And then again - they don’t even believe in the bill to pass it now, when they can pass it if they want to. Today. This very minute. Which sends a message to America: “You know this health care reform bill that we tried to tell you was good for America and that we argued the evil Republicans were holding up? The one we finally passed in the Senate with the Supermajority you gave us? Well, we Democrats don’t believe in it either. We were just kidding about how important it is and what a good bill it is, because even WE won’t pass this piece of shit. OH -but do believe us next time we want 60 votes and work for a year to get something passed. (suckers.)”
If you need 60 to get anything done, fine. Make the Republicans get nothing done. Play their game, hardball style, and rework the Democratic Party into something that can actually hold together a caucus when voting time comes around, so that when the momentum swings back to Democrats and 60 seats happens again ten years down the line, stuff gets done.
But that won’t happen. What will happen is the Democrats will roll over and play bitch for the Republicans.
