Look, you Dems can piss and moan about the obstructionist Reps all you want, but the fact remains you had a filibuster-proof 60/40 hold on the Senate for a year and couldn’t do it. Just put a bill on the floor and give a finger to the right side of the aisle as it passes.
So why didn’t you?
Because the reason the Democrats have a 60 seat majority is that they have a wide tent. That wide tent means that there are ultra liberals to very conservatives in their party. As it happens the very conservatives didn’t want to vote for it, which means less than 60 votes.
The Republicans have poisoned debate by calling HCR a communist plot, death panels and so on. This means that the conservative Dems must face their conservative districts and keep pulling to the right. It took wheeling and dealing to get that last vote, and it took forever to happen.
They just barely got by, with zero Republican support, until the Republicans won the seat in Mass, and they lost their 60th vote.
The fact is that Republicans are acting like a bunch of hysterical frothing vaginas, so any major legislation takes 60 votes because they are invoking filibuster like a teen-aged boy who just discovered masturbation.
So it is hardly the Dems fault that zero Republicans voted with them.
My guess is that they aren’t confident that UHC will be as good as they say it is. If they established universal health care entirely on their own, every setback or flaw becomes entirely their fault.
Lobohan has most of it above.
Add in Dems are as beholden to their corporate puppet masters as any Rep is. Reps were diehard opposed to anything Dem no matter what it was (pretty sure the Reps would oppose a declaration that kittens are cute if a Dem put it out there).
Given the new, need 60 votes to pass anything Bill in the Senate, you only have to peel away one Dem for a win. As it happens the health care industry had three in their pocket.
Slam dunk.
Do teenage boys do that a lot?
EDIT: Filibuster, I mean.
Like a mothe…
It’s worth re-iterating that this idea that “Well, of course you have to have 60 votes to pass anything in the United States Senate. Duh–it’s the U.S. Senate!” is really a fairly new phenomenon.
It’s obviously harder to get 60 votes than it is to get 51. American political parties are like that–we have 536 separately elected barons up in Washington, they all stand or fall more or less on their own, none of them face immediate re-election because their party fails to pass important legislation (they way they all would in a parliamentary system), and party discipline is relative weak. If the Democrats only had 50 votes, plus a Democratic Vice President, it would be immediately and intuitively obvious that getting any serious legislation done would be very dicey. Well, in recent years we’ve somehow allowed 60 to become the new 50, and what on paper is a healthy majority is in reality razor thin.
If the Democrats had only had to get 51 votes (or 50 plus Joe Biden), they would have passed a bill months ago (and probably by more than just 50+Joe Biden)*. Passing a bill in the Senate with, say, 56 votes, is not something that ought to be seen as some ruthless undemocratic crush-the-minority steamroller tactic of naked mob rule by the majority party.
*Or if they didn’t it would damned well be blatantly obvious that the blame was all on them.
So does this mean that if the Dems are honest about it, it wasn’t 100% the fault of the 40 Reps?
Who says that it is?
It’s the fault of the 40 Republicans insofar as their obstinate filibustering sets the bar at the very difficult level of 60 instead of the more manageable 50. There’s nothing that says you need to pass HCR with a supermajority–the Republican Senators are using procedural tactics to force the Dems to get a supermajority. A far better version of HCR would have passed long ago if Reid didn’t have to pay off Nelson and Leiberman.
Exactly. The barriers to passing UHC were Lieberman and Max Baucus and Kent Conrad and other members of the “filibuster-proof” Democratic senate in the pockets of the HC industry.
Uhh … no. It takes 60 Democrats for a majority, but only 50 Republicans. This is because people like Glenn Beck now dominate political debate, and Americans seem unable to grasp that the Beck-Limbaugh hypocrisies of one year contradict those of the next.
Many politically-aware Americans believe that the 2000 election result was heavily influenced by election-evening perfidy of FoxNews. Do you think the small matter of Senate protocols presents any difficulty to Beck and Hannity’s gang?
Well, yeah. I blame the Republicans for doing this, and I blame the Democrats for letting them do this. And the American people for snoozing through civics class and being generally clueless about how their own damned country works.
The Republicans had a goal, and they succeeded. The Democrats had a goal, and they failed. That’s all there is to it.
LBJ would never had let this happen.
I agree with this. The average American citizen knows very little about how our government works or who most of the major players are. People know who the president is and perhaps who their congressional representatives are but only a few pay close attention. Democracy is not very effective if the public is largely uninformed and indifferent.
Democrats have a wide tent. Anyone who says otherwise gets kicked out of the party like Lieberman.
Regards,
Shodan
Explain to us in a little more detail how Lieberman got “kicked out”. :rolleyes: Sounds fascinating.
The Democrats don’t want to pass UHC.
UHC, when you get beyond airy generalities, isn’t actually that popular among voters.
Well, it’s obvious. Lieberman was still a Democrat when he kicked himself out of the party!