Why do Democrats have to save you from yourselves ? If the Teabagger caucus is a problem. Then get rid of them. America could have had a public option that would have held down the cost in the private sector just by its existence as an alternative. All that was needed was a couple of Republican votes.
I did not say whether I was for RyanoCare or not. I bragged about how smart I am and how I'd get the job done. :0)
Regardless your plan still demands that Dems offer what they were unwilling to give.
How's that?
Obamacare couldn't have been repealed without replacing, due to the filibuster. The only way around the filibuster was reconciliation, and reconciliation was only available for a policy that didn't boost the deficit. Since the CBO had scored Obamacare as lowering the deficit, it's likely they would have scored a straight-up repeal as raising the deficit, rendering it ineligible for reconciliation, and thus allowing the Dems in the Senate to block it. The only way to use reconciliation was to build a whole package of changes that the CBO would score as lowering the deficit, which is what they did. But then that package becomes vulnerable to the "freedom caucus" extremists, who were insisting on straight repeal and would regard anything constructive, no matter how far right-wing, as "Obamacare Lite."
Sorry, filibuster rules were meant to be played with. Ask Reid.
It's against the long-term interests of the GOP to do so. A filibuster preserves the status quo. In the big picture, progressives want to push ahead with change while the essence of conservatism is resisting change. For Republicans to weaken the filibuster for a momentary advantage, thus speeding future progressive advances, would be a tactical win and a huge strategic blunder.
I think the liberal base is currently in a state where it would be politically safer to vote against Republican-backed changes than to buy into the catastrophe the Republicans were creating, even if it would be a smaller catastrophe than the Republicans would own without Democratic help fixing the damage. At least I'm hoping the Democrats have finally learned that lesson. For years, they seemed to think they'd get some sort of brownie points for bipartisanship, when in fact all it meant was that they'd share the burden of blame for conservative disasters (e.g., the way Hillary Clinton spent the last thirteen years of her career trying to excuse her complicity in the Republican blunder into Iraq).
Actually, it's working about as expected. The share of Americans with healthcare is up, premiums are about where they were projected, US life expectancy is climbing back up the international rankings, etc. In fact, budget analysis says it's poised to be about 20% cheaper than expected:
B.S. Reid did it. Besides I don't like the filibuster. Either stand up and speak for hours on end or let the vote happen.
Funny, I'd think if Obamacare was repealed, the loving and caring Democrats would go along with any money put back into the system to pay for the poor and indigent. They'd have a hard time arguing the way you are.
The insurance companies are leaving the Obamacare Risk Pool market for a reason. Sounds like you know why. What is that reason?
And this is the "brilliant" Democrat strategy.
Reid aligns with the progressives, so weakening the filibuster is in the long-term best interest of his ideas.
It's a maturing market. New markets generally have a big rush of participants hoping to get their foot in the door, and then a shake-out when most exit. As I've mentioned before, in the early days of home video game consoles, there were dozens of companies that tried their hand at it, and now there are effectively just three. Similarly, in the early days of automobiles, there were countless little companies producing them, most of which ended up bankrupt or gobbled up by the few surviving big producers. That's just what happens as a market matures. In most areas, there are still sufficient insurers for competition. In a handful of rural areas, there aren't, because it's hard for insurers to get good economies of scale in those places to make a profit. A few tweaks to Obamacare, possibly including boosted subsidies and higher penalties for individuals who don't get insurance, may be needed to fix that. But that's the kind of minor tune-up work you should expect when running a new machine.
Nonsense. The filibuster needs to go as a crutch. And when progressives need to be blocked by a filibuster and there isn't one there will most likely still be a second amendment.
Do you hear that flush? That is the Obamacare floater turd going bye bye. After one flush or another it will go to the septic tank. ha ha Why? Because a republic can't run on an ethos of theft from its citizens.
I'd be happy to see it go. I'm sick of the Republicans acting like the filibuster is a holy institution, when it's their way of, say, trying to stop the Civil Rights Act, or a jobs bill, or gun control, or an improvement to healthcare, etc., and then turning around and treating it as nothing but a picky parliamentary convention when it's standing between them and something they lust, like upper-class tax cuts or a gutting of welfare. At one point, those unspeakable scumbags were filibustering 70% of the major bills before Congress. It's time for that to end. And, since the Republicans only are going to let it end at a moment when it's tactically advantageous to them (even if it's a strategic error), because they always think in terms of partisan advantage instead of the interests of the country, then let it end now.
The whole reason the Republicans filibuster gun control is because they know the Second Amendment doesn't mean what they've told the marching morons that it means. If it did, they could let gun control go through on a simple majority vote and then have implementation stopped by a court order, and then overturn the law on Second Amendment grounds. But the truth is there is wide scope for gun control under even the absurdly expansive Heller court interpretation of the Second Amendment. In theory, you could have national gun control as tight as the tightest combined gun control of the various states, without running afoul of the Second Amendment, since those controls all survive in the various states despite the court having recently decided the second amendment applies against the states as well. If a control can survive in a state, then it would be Constitutional at the national level, too. That leaves a whole bunch of Constitutional room to control firearms nationally, even just rolling out existing ideas from the states to the federal level (e.g., waiting periods, mandatory training, requiring all sales to go through a licensed firearm dealer, restricting magazine sizes, outlawing assault-style weapons, and so on). So that's why the Republicans have leaned so heavily on anti-democratic parliamentary procedures to prevent popular legislation from going through: they know it would survive challenge in the courts.
If Obamacare were theft, then by the same reasoning Medicare and Medicaid would be even more so, as would Social Security. They've shown remarkable staying power. Will Obamacare? Tough to say, but at this point it has survived challenge despite the House, Senate, and presidency all being in the hands of right-wing weirdos.
You can wax eloquent about theft but it isn't going to get you anywhere but a civil war.
Liberal progressive leadership has been so bad that gun control will get them killed.
Medicare and Social Security TAXES are theft. And though created decades ago that along with $17 Trillion in the War on Poverty has put us into a $20T fiscal hole that has likely stolen the future of the children.
1. Yep
Then everything I accused the Democrats of and feared most about their antiamerican behavior is confirmed.
So you're saying for the last 8 yrs Republicans were anti American. That is quite a confession. Why have you held it in for so long ?
I've no clue what you're talking about. The paragraph you responded to was about why I wanted to see the filibuster eliminated and you're responding with words about theft.
How so?
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Theft is defined as an unlawful taking of property. Duly enacted taxes are legal and thus are not theft.
In terms of debt burden, the future looked great as recently as 1981. Back then, federal debt was just 31.7% of GDP, and had been falling at a rate of about 2.5 points per year, since 1946, meaning we were on a pace to be completely out of debt by 1993. Unfortunately, that was the start of the Reaganomic catastrophe, and thanks to Reagan's pinning America down and spreading her legs for a good reaming by the upper-class, debt started to sky rocket. That gang rape by the aristocracy left federal debt back up to 64.0% of GDP by GHW Bush's last budget year.
If we're going to redefine that word so that it includes legal taking, then one could make that claim about conservatives -- that their whole M.O. is to set up a crooked capitalist system to allow them to use market forces to steal the value created by the working class, to hand it to the upper class.
