That story says he’s joining the filibuster “as a matter of conscience”. Whose conscience is he talking about?
jayjay
November 9, 2009, 8:56pm
82
His own conscience, of course. All of those nice Hartford-based insurance companies have given him SO much money over the last few years that he just can’t possibly disappoint them by voting for legislation that would hit them in the profits…
Lieberman is a whore ,selling his votes to the medical companies. He does not do the peoples work. His wife has been working for insurance companies for decades. He is an example of what is wrong with the system. Yet the dems acted all forgiving after he campaigned for Bush. They do not realize how he can be bought.
gonzomax:
Lieberman is a whore ,selling his votes to the medical companies. He does not do the peoples work. His wife has been working for insurance companies for decades. He is an example of what is wrong with the system. Yet the dems acted all forgiving after he campaigned for Bush. They do not realize how he can be bought.
Exactly. Why the hell is this guy even still a Democrat?
He’s not. He’s an “Independent Democrat” now, and isn’t allowed to go to Democratic Caucus leadership meetings anymore. I guess they let him keep his committee seats just so he’d vote with them most of the time.
See post 56. Basically, Reid is too much of a wuss to kick Lieberman out.
Because it feeds his self-indulgent pity party :
But Lieberman was the most prominent iconoclast, at least up until now. For close to a decade, he got nearly perfect scores from the American Public Health Association, which backs a single-payer health-care system, and in lieu of that, the “public option.” Now, all of a sudden, he’s so outraged by a public option that he’s threatening to filibuster any bill that contains it. The arguments he makes on behalf of his new position are remarkably weak: He says the public option will raise costs, even though the Congressional Budget Office has said no such thing, and even though logic suggests that by competing with private insurers, a government plan will actually drive costs down. Some have accused Lieberman of shifting right in order to win backing from the insurance industry in preparation for a 2012 reelection run. But, in fact, he gets relatively little insurance money, and Connecticut politicos mostly think he won’t run.
So why is he doing this? Because he’s bitter. According to former staffers and associates, he was upset by his dismal showing in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. And he was enraged by the tepid support he got from many party leaders in 2006, when he lost the Democratic primary to an anti-war activist and won reelection as an independent. Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right.
The irony is that when Lieberman was officially a Democrat, he was ideologically independent—a living manifestation of the Humphrey-Jackson tradition. Now that he’s technically an independent, he’s becoming a standard-issue conservative. For people who believe—as Lieberman himself once did—in progressive health-care reform, it’s a tragic shift. It’s also boring. Another interesting senator bites the dust.
“He’s with us on everything except the war.”
Yeh, riiiiiight.