Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat, he’s an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate. He calls himself a socialist. According to Progressive Punch, he’s the 12th most progressive member of the Upper Body. They rank him as first or tied for first on health care, opposing corporate subsidies, education and the arts, fair taxation, family planning, housing, labor rights, and issues of war and peace. The rankings at Progressive Punch favor senators who have been elected in the last two election cycles because they never had to serve under Bill Frist and cast deliberately difficult votes, but among the group of senators that have been in office since before 2007 only Jack Reed of Rhode Island has a better progressive score than Bernie Sanders (you might remember that I lobbied hard for Reed to get the VP nomination).
It was Bernie Sanders who introduced a single-payer amendment to the Senate health care reform bill. I don’t think it is controversial at all to say that on health care, at least, Sanders is the best of the 100 members of the Senate. So, naturally, FDL Action is threatening him with a primary from his left because he is voting for the president’s number one domestic agenda, the Senate health care reform bill. This is on a day when Jane Hamsher appeared on Fox & Friends and teamed up with Grover Norquist in some kind of conspiracy-laden pogrom against the president’s chief of staff.
I was polite for a while. Anyone still left in the employ of FDL ought to consider heading for exits now. It ain’t gonna get any prettier.
