Tag: democrats

The funny thing about all of this is that no matter how bad all their ideas are, no matter how disastrous their governance has been, no matter how many horrible things they have done to the economy and this country, what really is killing the Republican party is that deep down, they are just complete assholes.
[…]
People don’t like to be treated like crap, and grown-ups don’t want to be associated with people who yell “You lie” or scream “socialism” or “Hitler” or accuse you of being a terrorist whenever they don’t get their way.

John Cole, hitting on a very basic reality for today’s GOP.
Naturally, this is bad for the Democrat.

Every vote over the minimum necessary to secure passage represents compromises that the Democrats as a group would prefer not to make. It’s not that Nancy Pelosi was lucky to pass the bill, it’s that the Democrats wrote the strongest bill they could that would get enough votes to pass. That’s good strategy.

Rafe Colburn, who I currently agree with 100%.

Go Die in the Streets is catching on, though under the Die Quickly! rubric. I still take, nay DEMAND credit, though.

When pressed by the GOP for an apology, Grayson gave them one:

“I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

More like this, please.

Reconcile This

Ezra Klein muses on reconciliation:

“…a reconciliation bill should not look like the current health-care reform bill. It should be an expansion of public programs: Bring Medicaid up to 150 or 200 percent of the poverty line and allow people from 45 to 65 to buy into Medicare and give some of them tax credits to do so. I don’t know if there are votes for that strategy. But it wouldn’t run afoul of the Senate parliamentarian.”

Absolutely. Sounds good to me. And I think the surest way to bring your more recalcitrant conservative Democrats aboard (and maybe even a Republican or two) is to offer these as your legislative choices on the (much harder to deal with) Senate side:

1) Some modified Baucus bill type package with a Rockefeller-style robust public option (or per-state’s option to activate said plans) that goes through “normal” channels, gets 60 votes for cloture, and then 51 for final passage. Goes to Conference to line it up with the House’s existing version.

-or-

2) We put it through reconciliation as Medicare for all. You want to buy in, buy in. You can’t afford it, we’ll subsidize you. You like your current plan: keep it. 51 votes to pass, House has to pass something new to match.

I think there’d be a waiting line on option (1) about 45 seconds after the wheels were set in motion. And reconciling a Medicare-for-all with the House? I don’t see that as a big problem; they’d have something passed about 45 minutes later…after all, it’s essentially what a number of them tried to push through on the first go-round anyway. It’s my understanding that they failed because of a (perceived) lack of support for such a move on the Senate side (e.g. such a move would be DOA; better to pass something akin to what the Senate might be moving to pass).

Invisible Hand

Ezra Klein puts this simple concept as well as I’ve yet seen:

Liberals don’t think that Congress will pass a bill outlawing private insurance. They don’t think the Supreme Court will render a decision naming WellPoint “cruel and unusual.” Rather, they think the market will, well, work: The public option will provide better service at better prices and people will choose it. Or, conversely, that the competition will better the private insurance industry and that people won’t need to choose it.

But that confidence rests on a very simple premise: The public sector does a better job providing health-care coverage than the private sector. If that proves untrue – and I would imagine most every conservative would confidently assume that that’s untrue – the plan will fail. The public option will not provide better coverage at better prices, and so it will not be chosen, and it will languish. Indeed, if it languishes, it will lack customers and thus lack bargaining power and economies of scale, and get worse even as the private insurers get better. In that scenario, the public option not only fails, but it discredits single-payer entirely.

The liberals are willing to bet that they’re right. It’s not a sneaky strategy: It’s an up-front wager. The conservatives are not, however, willing to bet that they’re wrong. They’re willing to say the public option will fail, but not give consumers the chance to decide that for themselves.

If we had a working government, maybe we’d get to try things, work for good policy, and ultimately get to the best outcome for the American people, whatever that might be. Why are the conservatives in this argument so afraid of The Market? What don’t they want us to find out?

Why not 100 votes?

Ben Nelson, (D) of Fucktardia, has lots of fascinating thoughts to share on the healthcare fight:

Voters should be able to evaluate “what’s been done and what remains to be done” before they go to the polls, Nelson said.

“Public debate can occur in the context of an election,” he added.

So, then, the outcome of the 2008 elections, the one held less than a year ago, in which healthcare was a central, if not very nearly THE CENTRAL issue, which came up in debates at the primary and national level…those elections: not to be counted. There should be several more elections, and if healthcare proponents can win each in a landslide: then and only then we can begin to consider taking up real reform.

But stopping with that sort of vaguely insane talk isn’t enough. Not for Ben Nelson:

But Nelson said 60 votes isn’t enough. The Nebraska Democrat said he’d only feel comfortable voting for a bill that he knows can get at least 65 votes.

“I think anything less than that would challenge its legitimacy,” he said.

Why stop there? Why settle for some interim position? The only possible outcome here is full commitment: that’s it, unanimous vote. Anything else would be unacceptable. And, presumably, after a unanimous vote and a Presidential signature, you’d need to let the states decide, unanimously, whether or not to implement. Why, it all makes perfect sense. It’s the only way for it to be legitimate.

[T]he time has come–and in fact, it is long overdue–for them to begin forcefully making the case that being a member in good standing of the party’s Senate caucus means supporting cloture motions on key legislation even if a given senator intends to vote against it.

–Ed Kilgore, Closed Vote; The New Republic

The Flashpoint

“[Obama said] ‘everyone should get the same deal as members of Congress.’ But you take the text of these bills, and not only are you not getting the same deal as members of Congress, who get a dozen or more choices in the D.C. area, but people aren’t going to get any choice at all. It’ll be tethered to a policy that many people might think is pretty crummy. Some of those policies will be high-deductible, going up 10 or 12 percent a year. And people are going to think that’s pretty crummy.

[…]

As for the people who don’t have coverage and are making $65,000, those people look at Washington and see us saying you’ll have to pay 13 percent of your income, and then we’re going to clobber you with all these co-pays and deductibles, and some government official comes and says, ‘We’ll give you an exemption’? No middle-class people will be attending rallies holding signs saying “thank you for my exemption!”

— Ron Wyden, speaking the Truth from on high, via Ezra Klein