I can’t tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I wasn’t happy at all with the proposed Senate bill, but is it worse than nothing at all? I guess that depends on who you are. Regardless, it looks like the Democrats in Congress aren’t keen on speeding the Senate bill through the House now that Coakley lost and a man who said his daughters were “available” in his “I beat the bitch” victory speech is now the Junior Senator from Massachusetts:
Scott Brown’s decisive Senate victory in Massachusetts imperiled the fate of the Democratic health care overhaul in Tuesday as House Democrats indicated they would not quickly approve a Senate-passed health care measure and send it to President Obama. […]
House approval of the Senate plan was favored by some lawmakers and strategists as a way to quickly resolve the issue and deliver the president a bill on a signature domestic achievement with just one final House vote. Remaining problems could be worked out with a subsequent piece of legislation.
But many House Democrats expressed deep reservations about the Senate bill, and those complaints, combined with the message sent by the Massachusetts electorate, apparently were sufficient to leave Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her lieutenants reluctant by Tuesday night about moving in that direction.
Democrats now face decisions on whether to give up on the health care fight — an approach few lawmakers appear willing to entertain — or perhaps pull together a scaled-back measure and use special procedural rules that would eliminate the need for 60 votes in the Senate. But it is not clear how many of the key provisions of the legislation could be passed under such a procedure.
They should have gone with the <a href="“we’ll only need 51 votes in the Senate” reconciliation process from the get go and kept the public option part of the final legislative package from the original House bill. Once Republicans win on health care reform by using delay and obfuscation and the threat of the filibuster in the Senate, you can bet other key pieces of reform such as regulation of the banks and Wall Street, environmental legislation, additional spending to stimulate job growth and other important and necessary reforms will go down in flames the same way.
Our manly Democratic Leaders from President Obama to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to that incompetent nebbish of a Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (<who has to take more than his fair share of the blame for this mess) are, to use the words of my daughter’s friend, sucky. Very sucky, actually. Only Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have a clue. Too bad she wasn’t put in charge of running the show.
Just my opinion, mind you.
Obama, his administration, and the Democratic leadership have sure been a disappointment so far.
It is one thing to take a principled stand and lose.
It is quite another to lead by throwing favors at vested interests and roses at the feet of everyone who opposes you…and STILL LOSE.
W…E…A…K!
DLC. Once again. Republican Lite always loses to Republicans.
At this point, letting the current process on HCR die is probably better than trying to ram something quarter-assed through by means the Republicans and the media are sure to nail as tricky. The Senate bill is so bad for so many reasons, the left – such as it is – would have trouble being convincing in selling it.
Mostly what I worry about is young people and African-Americans turning away from politics as hopeless for getting anything done, which would mean that the real terrorists – the Republican far right – have won.
Democrats have managed to turn a huge mandate – two straight big wins – into mush. The Democratic base is somewhere between discouraged and furious. Conservative Democrats remain gutless about everything. Independents seem to have become convinced Democrats are responsible for the current economic mess. Elected Republicans are too terrified of their far right to have any serious policies about anything. And the far right has captured the disaffected market with their fascist-lite demagogy. This does not bode well.
A year ago Democrats should have grabbed a message about how deeply Bush and the entire Republican Party screwed the economy and hammered on it for six months (it’s too late now); resolved to make Republicans in the Senate stay on the floor in their jammies at the first instance when they pledged to filibuster so that everyone understood right away who was obstructing needed measures; and made HCR a simple “Medicare for all.” Now we own the mess. Deeply, deeply discouraging.
yes, but they didn’t. and people who said “think big” were told “half a loaf is better than none.”
oh well. coulda, woulda, shoulda. Well, maybe not “woulda”.
The fact that you could even ponder something good about tens of millions of Americans remaining uninsured and tens if thousands dying as a consequence shows that liberals can be as morally bankrupt as conservatives.
Agreed. And every House critter needs to buck up and quit turning tail and running! If they do the right thing, their careers, for most of them, will be all right. If they turn tail and run, they will get chased out of office!
P.S. And Senate critters also. But the House just needs to do what has to be done right now to pass the Senate bill, while also working on other ways to get the most important changes into future legislation where they can use reconcilation more easily!
The House better not pass it before they exact a heavy price .. because we all damn well know .. that otherwise .. the Senate will just screw them over
I have become so cynical!. It is like a giant shell game, but the kicker is that the pea isn’t under any of the shells. Corporate Merica took all the peas away decades ago. We simply are so desperate that we play the game anyway remembering a time long ago when we at least thought there were shells with peas under them.