You’re too complementary.
that’s the funniest think I’ve read in some time.
Yeah, it’s kinda on the total bullshit side of misleading.
The amendment was never meant to add anything useful to the bill. The chances that ED drugs for sex offenders would actually be paid for by tax payers is small. The add is on the outright lie side of spin, similar to Grayson’s unfortunate choice in the Taliban Dan add.
Can someone explain using only factual answers how if the Democrats had simply just voted on and approved the amendment denying Viagara for child molesters, that would have “killed health care reform?” I don’t buy the “it could have blown up” excuse - if the Republicans voted for it, and the Democrats then all voted for it…how does that stop the bill? By my understanding, it has no actual impact on the bill as a whole.
IIRC, accepting amendments would’ve sent the reconciliation bill back to the House. The bill had already passed there with thin margins, and part of the deal for getting it through was that the Senate would pass the Reconciliation bill as it was.
Its wrong to say it would’ve “blown up” health care, as the ACA had already passed. But it would’ve killed the Reconciliation bill, which expanded the ACA, and pissed of House Dems.
It’s my understanding that Republicans gained a seat in the Senate in between the time when the bill was originally passed, and when the “bill killing” amendments were proposed. That one seat the Republicans gained broke the filibuster proof majority, meaning that if the bill actually had to be voted on again it would not have passed. Adding the amendment would have killed the bill, because it would have caused an additional vote which the Democrats no longer had the majority to overcome.
I guess that makes sense, if that’s what happened.
What the Republicans were really doing was a “camel’s nose in the tent” strategy.
They offered literally dozens of amendments on a huge range of subjects. The basis of the strategy was that if Republicans could peel off several Democratic votes for an obviously acceptable amendment, then it would be harder for those Democrats to vote against other amendments that were hard to vote against.
For example, if a Democratic Senator voted to ban Viagra, why couldn’t they vote to uphold the Second Amendment? If they voted to uphold the Second Amendment, why couldn’t they vote for more breast cancer screenings? At least if Democratic Senators voted against everything, they could say they opposed BS Republican political amendments – it gets harder to explain why a Senator might vote for some but not others.
At some point, it was hoped that an amendment would be passed by the Senate that would not be acceptable to a small number of Democrats in the House. That would cause the small number of House Democrats to switch their vote from supporting the reconciliation (aka the “changes” bill) to opposing it, causing it to fail.
So, what would Republicans gain since the House already passed the health care reform bill, and this was just changes to it? Literally, the main point was to sour relations between the House and the Senate, to get Democrats on either side of Capitol Hill angry at each other for not being able to hold up their side of the bargain on how to get health care reform passed. It was nothing more than a scorched earth policy by Republicans, who were upset that they were outmaneuvered on procedural grounds by Dems to get HCR passed in an… unusual way.
I don’t think that’s true. Any amendment would’ve sent the bill back to the House, reneging on the Senates pledge to House Dems. There wasn’t any need to “trick” Senate Dems into voting for a particular amendment House Dems might not like, even the most innocuous amendment would’ve worked.
The whole thing was theater in any case, there wasn’t really any chance the Dems would vote yes on the amendments (and even if one or two did, that wasn’t enough to actually add the amendment). The point was for the GOP to get a bunch of votes on record that they could use against the Dems in the mid-terms, as Angle is now doing. Reid had actually given the GOP time to add such amendments knowing this would happen in return for the Republicans not using other procedural manuvers to further delay the Reconciliation vote.
A little off topic, but I truly dilike when someone takes a common name and purposely misspells it. Sharon is spelled with one r. Sharon. When parents do this, the kid all their life will have to tell people that there is an extra r in the name and/or they are misspelling the name with letter and postcards with the extra r somewhat sandwhiched in.
In this age of google, having a unique name is a benefit.
(As someone with a unique name… I’m very easy to google.)
Ah yes, the camel’s nose in the tent. From the same playbook as the glass-bottom boat, the hot Carl, the southern trespass, the Houdini, the blumpkin, the dog in a bathtub, and the cajun hot stick.
They’d try the Dirty Sanchez, but he got stopped by a cop in Arizona.