That’s beside the point. Claiming that the bill was rammed through because no Republicans voted for it is putting the cart before the horse; the bill was written to appease Republicans, who approved it and then decided not to vote for it.
And they’re childish to think so.
The lack of the rejected minority’s input was their own fault entirely. It isn’t as if the majority didn’t try, you know. Or, maybe, being a fool, you don’t know.
Was there no emotional burst before, fool?
Not me, they don’t recognize me, because I’m in disguise. Stealth boomer.
There were about 200 Republican-sponsored amendments in the final bill. How many are required before a Republican will vote for the bill? 300? 500? The totality of the bill?
Maybe, as long as it didn’t have anything that Democrats were okay with.
You’re an idiot. Don’t waste my time.
And whose fault is that? What kind of screwy argument holds the Democrats responsible for the deliberate obstructionism by the Republicans? It sounds like, “It’s your fault we refused to vote for it!”. Makes no sense at all.
Same sort of argument that blames the wife for being beaten by her husband.
Indeed.
We’ve come full circle, and defined today’s Republican Party.
THE ROAST BEEF DIDN’T BURN ITSELF, GOD DAMN IT!
-Joe
Say, long as you’ve got so much time on your hands, can you get back to telling us about that story about Dems burning a black church to blame the Republicans? What happened, you look it up and find out it was a steaming load? And now you want to pretend you never said it?
Good luck with that, scooter.
About that church burning… You want to answer peoples questions about that church burning?
All terrorist acts are wrong. All vandalism and death threats are wrong. Running “suspected Obama supporters” off the road is wrong. Take a page from Bricker’s book, he is Republican, he is (in large part) right wing, but he felt no shame in denouncing these acts, and did not resort to an attempt at equivalency. Why can’t you do the same? “We on the left” have no problem denouncing ELF, Green Peace, PETA or tree spikers, do we? We just do it. We call them crazies, assholes, all sorts of things.
An asshole is an asshole. Don’t justify these clowns.
That’d doesn’t make any sense. You know they discussed a public option and then removed it to try to get more conservative votes. You know that Snowe in particular was targeted and that they tried to enlist her support. She did end up supporting the bill in committee before voting against it. So what is your position here exactly? “They tried to get her support, but because she didn’t vote for the bill, they didn’t try to get it?”
The Republicans could have gotten some of that into the final bill if they had participated in any kind of negotiation. He offered to include tort reform ideas, for example. They threw their lot with the Tea Partiers instead, so they got nothing. Obama was elected in part because he expressed a lot of willingness to work with both parties. Congressional Republicans decided the best way to win more seats was to deny him the ability to claim bipartisan success and support. So they wouldn’t give him one single vote on anything no matter what he offered no matter what. And in the end they failed: the health care bill was compromised and it took forever, but it passed. They managed to make it unpopular, but that’s the choice they made. They decided being partners on a popular bipartisan bill would not benefit them as much as being the futile, infantile opposition to this bill. After all, Obama would have gotten most of the credit on the bill if they’d supported it. The end result was they didn’t get much of what they wanted even though the plan was well short of what the left wanted. It didn’t have to go like this, but they decided “Obama’s death panels are going to kill my baby” was the optimal electoral strategy. Your beef is with them.
Fuck, you really are that stupid. Serves me right. But for the record, no, it’s not Obama’s fault people are threatening to shoot people who supported his bill. The blame primarily goes to the people who are making the death threats, of course, but some of the blame goes to the politicians who’ve spent a year telling the public that the health care bill is going to kill their children and elderly relatives and destroy democracy.
Can I get an answer to any of my questions from earlier?
To repeat:
Is the statement that there were approximately 200 Republican-sponsored amendments to the bill true? If so, how many would it have taken to get a Republican to vote for it or before the bill would have been deemed bipartisan enough for a Republican to vote for it? If not, how many Republican-sponsored amendments did the bill contain?
And I’ll also call for an cite for your statement that some black churches were burned by Democrats so that the crime could be blamed on Republicans.
Thanks in advance for your time.
Hey, call me a fool a few more times, instead of, you know, making substantive arguments.
Those examples you cited were budget-oriented, which was what reconciliation was built for. This is not primarily a budget bill. You should know this. Perhaps I give too much credit to the peopple on this board.
You might actually reading your own cites before calling names.
If I were Obama, I’d have worked to include as many GOP votes as I could for something that affects this many Americans. He decided that he didn’t need/want them, that he needed the short term victory more than the long term damage it would do to the Dem hopes.
My thoughts are, it’s a bad way to run the country.
It only makes no sense if you are a partisan Democrat or hardcore lefty true-believer. If you are looking at it from the other side, you saw a bill that was developed on Harry Reid’s conference room table, was passed over the wishes of a plurality of Americans (and at most points in time, a majority), and used a lot of shady parliamentary tricks that had never been used for something this far reaching before.
I have no doubt that it got to the point where the GOP felt there was more to gain by making the opposition bipartisan w/no bipartisan support, so they went lockstep against it thinking it would help them the most in November. But it didn’t have to be that way early on; Obama and Reid and Pelosi could have put in some of the major GOP issues in here wrt tort reform and others… they just chose not to.
Not to sully this conversation wtih the facts or anything, but they removed the public option to get the votes of Lieberman, Landrieux, and Pryor, who are Democrats.
Bullshit. He was elected primarily because there was a financial meltdown in the 6 weeks leading up to the last Presidential election and McCain was tarred with that as his party held the WH.
Back to the OP: hey, lookie here. Turns out both sides have whackjobs. Who would have thunk it.
Hi Kolga, thanks for your pleasant tone, you seem to be one of the few reasonable posters in this thread.
I don’t know what to believe on this. A piece from last summer from Slate, which leans left, reports that there were 160 GOP amendments in the bill. The GOP committee members complain that they weren’t substantive, that they were virtually all ‘technical’ amendments. The fact that it was a pure party line vote out of committee, 13 Dems for and 10 GOP against, probably backs that up.
Slate’s summary on the amendments:
If you want to know what ‘technical’ amendments look like, here’s the example Slate cited:
Hardly the stuff of substance.
And some of the GOP substantive amendments clearly didn’t make the cut… at least I don’t think this one is in the final bill:
No, he DID get as many as were possible. It’s just that the Republicans were determined to oppose anything that Obama wanted regardless of the merits. There was nothing more he could have done; on the contrary, he has tried much too hard to be bipartisan with people who aren’t interested.