Clearly, Having a democrat president and a majority in both the house and senate still wasn’t enough to get a public option, a couple trillion dollars to start a second new deal to reverse the unemployment trend, enough regulation to make banking boring and less lucrative, a fixed, reasonable maximum interest rate (29.90% APR is insane) to castrate Credit card companies and other abusers, etc. etc.
But what if the democrats had dreamlike legislative conditions? Say, a democrat president and 65 senate seats, 65% of congress.
What do you believe would happen? Which laws would be passed and which would not?
I welcome opinions from both sides, though I’m quite clearly a liberal.
Nothing would change. The Democrats are cowardly, corrupt, and conservative. They could have a 100% Democratic congress and they’d still flinch with terror at the thought of Republican accusations of being too liberal, of being “tax and spend”, or not being patriotic or religious enough.They are also the paid lackeys of the wealthy, much like the Republicans. And they have gone father and farther to the right with every year; the only reason they can be still distinguished from the Republicans the the Republicans have gone right off the deep end.
I, for one, can’t tell them apart.
I have had front row center aisle seat at The Emperor’s New Clothes: Our American Dream now playing at The Great American Live Theater in Washington, DC and in living rooms near year you, 24/7.
This is a presentation of the Great American BS Ensemble.
Cast and production crew are corrupt and self-serving assholes, running up the public debt then charging us interest on it for their own enrichment to the loss of society.
Why aren’t they booed off the stage and shipped to Gitmo?
The key to making this corrupt charade plausible to the people is their involvement in the drama (fear) produced with sham political, social and economic tension. Get the audience jabbering among themselves and pointing fingers at each other and the play goes on.
After 8 yrs of Bush, anything looked good. So much the better that he’s black and clearly progressive. Plenty of fuel for public “debate” there.
What kind of Democrats? Are they all like Denis Kucinich or are they all like <insert your favorite conservative Democrat here>?
The thing is, they’d still be answerable to the electorate, so unless the electorate changes significantly, you’re going to end up with a lot more conservative Democrats. And that is not a recipe for passing liberal or progressive legislation.
As one party expands and another contracts, as happened from 2006-2008 as the Democrats took over all the moderate districts, party affiliation for the expanding party becomes a poorer predictor of voting behavior, while for the other party it becomes a better predictor. That’s the simple reason that Republicans can get all 40 Senators to vote together, while the Democrats are forced to compromise internally. Republican Senators are partly responsible for obstructing things like cap-and-trade by forcing a cloture vote (for better or worse, depending on your view), but the rest of the responsibility lies with conservative voters in places like Nebraska and Arkansas to whom the center 15 or so Senators have to appeal.
I assume what the OP is really asking is not what would happen if there were 65 Ben Nelsons in the Senate, and 230 Blue Dogs in the House, but what would happen if 65% of both houses was made up of people like Patty Murray and Ben Cardin – people at the center of the Democratic Party. And the answer isn’t too hard to divine. Just look at the bills submitted by these kind of Democrats who are at the center of the party. You’d probably have health care with a public option, cap-and-trade, card check, etc.
The implication being that Democrats who whine about Republican obstructionism now are just deflecting. Thus, according to Shodan’s view, since the GOP cannot obstruct anything as a minority, what you’ve seen in the last year is exactly what Democrats would do with 65% control of Congress.
I disagree. They are already voting more conservatively than the electorate. It doesn’t matter that the majority of the public supported some form of single payer health care; that was never seriously considered. The opinions, needs and desires of the electorate matter very little to them.
Baloney. The question is whether the majority of the likely voters in the States represented by Senators 55-60 supported single payer. I’ve seen no credible evidence that that was true. Indeed, I doubt a majority of Americans could even explain what single payer health care is.
When has wealth (capital) not held sway, anywhere?
A little US history. We are the prodigy of Britain, prodigy of Rome … .
More wealth for the wealthy … bread, circuses and, at last, Dancing With The Stars for the people.
The 13 Original Oligarchies were British chartered. They were about evenly divided into Northern/Southern Capital, NC/SC.
NC did trade and manufacturing on the backs of slave wage women and children and immigrants certified (by the British Crown) as indentured servants. NC could point to SC slaves and make the Northern poor realize how lucky they were to be working for nothing as free people and patriotically sign up for preserving the Union of NC.
SC did agriculture on the backs of outright slaves and poor white tenants/trash/overseers. Just as long as they weren’t ns, the Southern poor would report uppity ns and patriotically march off to war for SC to establish the Confederacy of SC.
Ingenious.
The War Of Northern Aggression proved that Guns, Germs and Steel will out. It is, today, Our Constitutional Blueprint.
Hardly. Besides the fact that it cites a Rasmussen poll, someone known for a conservative bias, it appears to be more nitpicking over political tactics. Support for single payer as long as you don’t use the words “single payer”, is still support.