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On CBS’s Face the Nation, Senators Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mitch McConnell and Jay Rockefeller illustrated that there is no possibility of a decent health reform bill passing in the dysfunctional US Senate until they blow up its undemocratic rules.
There are likely 50+ votes to pass some version of the current Senate bill with a weak public option with a state opt out. There are likely 50+ votes to pass the bill with a Medicare buy-in for those aged 55 to 64. The Senate has already provided 54 votes against Senator Nelson’s tighter restrictions on abortion funding. There is strong support for the "CLASS" provisions for long-term care.
The only thing preventing the enactment of the bill is the Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to use procedures on the democratic and Constitutional principles of majority rule. And refusing to use those principles means that unprincipled opportunitists like Joe Lieberman have veto power over any bill to reform our inhumane health care system.
On Face the Nation, President Ben Nelson said he would veto a bill that did not sufficiently restrict abortion funding; President Unprincipled Opportunist Lieberman said he’d veto a bill that contained even a weak public option, a limited Medicare buy-in, and the "CLASS" Act. Senator Mitch McConnell could hardly contain his glee; he boasted that President Nelson and President Lieberman gave the 40 Obstructionist Republicans the power to kill health reform.
And make no mistake: if the issue wasn’t the public option, or the Medicare buy-in, these unprincipled opportunists would find some other excuse to be the scoundrels they are. This is not about specific features of health reform; it’s all about them.
Senator Rockefeller essentially said he didn’t know what to do about the fact that Presidents Nelson and Lieberman had health care reform by the throat.
Cut their balls off, Senator. Take the veto out of the hands of these irresponsible scoundrels. You know what to do, and we know you know what to do. Do it, or don’t ever ask for our support again.
83 Comments
Didn’t you love the line-up on this show: three terribles [Lieberman, Nelson & McConnell] and one not-too-bad-if-he-feels-like-it-on-this-particular-day [Rockefeller]?
I know Bernie Sanders’ time is limited, but couldn’t FTN dump ONE of these cretins for him?
Shameful.
Those pricks! Why isn’t Reid using reconciliation? Why is Joe getting to keep his committee chairs?
Where’s the party leadership?
Can I get an AMEN brothers and sisters!
yes, yes you can
Amen!!
Now that wasn’t predictable…
i don’t buy it. if the leadership wanted a good bill, we would have seen at least one come of out committee. once again, as we have seen before, the dem leadership is using rules as an excuse to do exactly what they want to do.
aside: the constitutional principle of majority rule also comes with principle of minority rights. senate rules that give the minority the right to be heard are not anti-democratic or anti-constitutional. that the dem leadership uses that as an excuse is not so much a problem with the rules as with the dem leadership. take the filibuster away, and all you do is make destruction of SS and medicare via “entitlement reform” that much easier. don’t fall for it.
Go check out Eve’s clips of the clinic in Kansas. Her clips should be spread far and wide. Hoping FDL puts this popping up on the front stage
I have sadly come to agree with that proposition, selise.
None of the leadership really wants real health care reform. They just wanted us to believe they did.
It’s pitiful, and enraging.
Did the primary challenge to Lieberman badicalize him or has he always been
this bad?
Banning the filibuster is a two-edged sword.
Guess what will happen to the next legislation that the conflict averse President Obama wants passed.
We don’t do metaphorical violence. Rhetorically yanking wankers yes, violence, no.
Shorter Lieberman, Nelson, and blue dogs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYqF_BtIwAU&feature=PlayList&p=0ED19589617E70DE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=2
The Benedict Arnolds of our time.
The 40/60 rule shouldn’t be touched; as said above, we will be on the other side one day, with Obama the day is close, and will have to protect SS, Medicare. Don’t forget, the Republican are still pissed with 5 day a week 8 hours a day. They want us all, no race discrimination, slaving for the rich.
The Dems went right since Reagan and reactionaries such as Nelson are the result. Hell, Obama is center-right. Lieberman was probably disliked in high school. He always was a pain in the butt. He was the first Dem to rebuke for his affair.
Amen. Except these two scoundrels do not have any balls. They are licking the insurance industries $$$$ balls..they are yellow bellied, white assed white men, money sucking cowards.
Send these guys to do time at the Free Health Care Clinics.
how can we make sure that these two pay a price for their traitorship?
Considering the messy and mostly pro Industry profit margins this legislation has thus far become perhaps it would be the best thing if we just let them kill this thing.
Calling it reform simply perverts the dictionary definition of the term, robing us of yet another point of reference by which we can reasonably communicate ideas amongst ourselves, so; fuck it!
You’re right Mauimom.
Every Sunday talk show does it, weather it be the the politicians interviewed at the beginning or the talking heads at the end.
And it seems whenever LIEberman or Graham is NOT on a Sunday show, McCain IS.
I thought the Dems won the election. When the Republicans won, THEY were the people on the shows back then.
Take away any seniority they have. Let them be un-persons in the Senate, especially HoJo who is with us on nothing, especially the war. Draft-dodging asshat that he is.
I thought everyone wanted this weak-ass bill to fail anyway?
Yes oldgold, it’s all because Lieberman could not accept his defeat to Ned Lamont in the Primary, even though the Dems (including Obama) were campaigning for him during the Primary.
Lieberman lost it when the Dems said they had to campaign for Their Party’s Candidate – Ned Lamont – and Lieberman is now doing everything he can to pay them back, after the Republicans dissed their own candidate in the General Election and voted Lieberman into another term.
I think the biggest culprits are the senators pretending to act in the public interest while trying to pass a bill which protects corporate profits and doesn’t actually reform anything.
Lieberman, Nelson, and the rest of the reform opponents, while lying about their actual motives are at least straightforward in regard to their desire to kill the bill.
The link to Eve’s post is here, and I had my take on the KC Free Clinic on the FDL front page yesterday.
I would pay good money to see their balls cut off, but sadly they don’t need our stinking support. They have whored themselves out so many times to corporations that their campaign war chests are over-flowing. Any attempt to unseat these corporate whores will be met with a good old-fashioned “swift-boating”. And the dumbed-down electorate will fall for it again and again.
Yeah, when Jay is through with them, the newly-minted choir boys (I’m thinking castrati here) should have to go wait in line in the emergency room with all the uninsureds they don’t give a crap about.
The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com
McInsane’s mascot is back in the news. How interesting.
Meanwhile, this UNinsured man in CT, discovered he had cancer and had to depend on neighbors to help pay for the $60,000 hospital bill.
Helping A Neighbor Get Back On His Feet
Lets see how fast Lieberman comes to help this man, whom Lieberman represents in the Senate. My advice to the cancer stricken man – Don’t hold your breath!
What do you mean ‘bad; he was Gore’s pick for VP, and Obama’s mentor in the Senate…
Do it, or don’t ever ask for our support again.
Amen, said the agnostic. If what comes out of this is only a gift to big pharma and big insurance, they’ve lost young Democrats for a generation. Not everyone is caught up watching trash TV. Some are paying attention. And it’s the Democratic base.
on the other hand, if you (D) captured progressives could ever muster the gumption to leave the reservation sometimes, like when a bill is this bad, you would be roundly thanking the obstructionists for saving us from the detestable mandates, and the disgrace of passing a huge giveaway written by and for the benefit of the despised insurance cartel.
I know, outside the box thinking is not the doctrinaire followers strongpoint, and if Lieberman is opposed to the passage, well, say no more, every good progressive must be for it!
nope, not this time. anyone or anything who brings down this debacle should have our gratitude.
Everything you said is true. This is the best summation on the politics of health care reform that I’ve seen. It emcompasses all the points in one article.
The saddest part to all of this is that President Obama and Senator Reid have squandered an historic opportunity and the goodwill of many people.
I would add this could cause us to lose the Democratic majority in the Senate and the House. There’s a saying…use it or lose it. Got it guys.
The President and Reid didn’t do it by themselves though. Every Progressive Senator could still put the pressure on them to do the right thing.
This will be a continuing nightmare if they don’t do this.
A pathetic demonstration of what has become of a nation that was supposedly founded on the principle of participative democracy.
Rendered worse by paralyzing an issue that is a moral imperative for any nation that professes to be civil and fair.
Dr. Rick Lippin
Southampton,Pa
http://medicalcrises.blogspot.com
If there is any credible evidence that the thousands of people who show up for the free health clinics or the tens of millions more without insurance would be grateful that we helped Joe Lieberman and Mitch McConnell achieve their goals, and the victims believed we did it to help them, I haven’t seen it.
And he didn’t do shit to help Gore.
(I don’t know what kind of mentor he is, but the results indicate that he’s no good to us there either.)
If we end up with a shitty bill, I say kill it altogether. Progressives have to show some muscle here, with the Democratic establishment if no one else.
I know Bernie Sanders has the guts. Does Feingold? Burris, two weeks after repeating his threat to vote nay on a bill without a strong public option, suddenly got the ethics investigation against him dropped, so I wouldn’t count on him.
found of Huff Post-”reports that an application has been made from someone named Joe Lieberman of CT to have his name officially changed to Judas Iscariot”
Dr. Rick Lippin
Southampton,Pa
http://medicalcrises.blogspot.com
[Mod Note: Please limit the links to your own web site to one per day.]
FDL moderator- of course(I’m new to this site)- Rick Lippin
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Stuart Weisberg’s Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman hosted by Lane Hudson
All of these men have shown their colors for years, it is nothing new.
Yet they all have been re-elected and re-elected time after time. We blame them, but the blame lies with their constituents who haven’t the brains to elect good people and remove the bad.
All of America’s bad Government, is because of bad voters.
Congress is getting heat from the AMA, American Hospital Association,
and the Federation of American Hospitals. They are strongly opposed to
expansion of medicare. They know they will have there reimbursments cut.
We were duped when the AMA said they supported Obama
care. That’s because they were promised there medicare payments would not be cut and Medicare Advantage plans would be cut instead (payments to insurance).
There is no way reform will work when all these players are able to control everything to work in there interest.
Maybe the government should dissolve the electorate, and get some decent voters? (Apologies to Bertolt Brecht.)
Bad voters?! Yeah right. It has nothing to do with billions of dollars and at least 50 years spent on conditioning us to abdicate our self-sovereign role in our governance to TPTB, the MOTU, the “leader of the free world.”
Nice job of blaming the victim. Haven’t you heard of propaganda, of “strategic domestic disinformation campaigns?” Don’t you know that our own military has been “firing” on us, in the form of battlefield psy ops?
What about longstanding and deliberate efforts to jack public opinion?
What about the so-called public servants, like Ken Blackwell in Ohio, who disenfranchised thousands of voters–were his victims “bad voters” for getting the electoral shaft?
Did yo0u just awake from an 8-year coma? I highly recommend Greg Palast’s book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (review by Baltimore Chronicle
Do you remember Katherine Harris?
I think you owe voting America an apology. It’s not cool to blame victims for getting jacked to hell and back, then stuck with the bill both ways, no matter how superior it may make one feel.
Repeat:
You know what to do.
We know you know what to do.
Do it.
Or don’t ever ask for our support again.
i think you are confusing health insurance with healthcare.
being forced to pay for the privilege of being underinsured when there is not enough money to pay the out of pocket expenses is not healthcare.
have you read glenn smith’s paper, The Logic of the Health Care Debate, by any chance?
i just read it recently (thanks to a forgotten commenter here who linked to it) although it was written in 2007.
i highly, highly recommend it.
here are some bits (my bold):
rage is good if the energy is put to good purpose.
just my opinion, but i don’t think this issue is one for politics as usual (insider compromises and electoral politics alone), major human rights advances depend on social movements, and that’s the kind of politics that i think are called for.
We need to start pushing the meme that if this proposal is voted against, there is no choice BUT Reconciliation. The whole argument they’ve used against Reconciliation was that it would take 6 weeks longer at least to get the bill passed. Well, if we have to start over from scratch because these Blue Dogs get a bug up their ass about this costing more, then we have no choice. I say we dare them to vote against it. They know if this goes to reconciliation, the bill will be far more liberal than it is and we’ll get a public option with real teeth because it will have to in order to meet the stipulations of the Byrd Rule. There can be no more compromises from the left. The Blue Dogs give in or it’s war!
yes, I’ve read it; basically agree with how it explains the different perspectives. I’m not confused about actual care vs insurance, but you seem to be convinced of that.
i said i think that. and i do. but only because i don’t know how else to understand your comment to spork @32.
if i’m all wet, would love to have another explanation.
and while i’m asking questions, if you read and agree with glenn et al.s paper, why didn’t you argue against the pre-compromise or at least defend those of us who did?
in order:
he doesn’t want a good bill to pass
he’s a member of the club, in good standing
the what?
Ditto!!!
I’m not sure they even cared that we think they cared…
more likely, they wanted to fool themselves that some where, deep inside, they did care. But they just couldn’t do anything about it… because of someone else’s fault.
Perhaps they wanted to fool some of the legacy media, too, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
I for one am glad that he is holding up the bill. It is a garbage bill and forcing me to buy health insurance under threat of penalty from the IRS when I cant find a job is not what I call reform. The bill stinks and just bcz the republicans dont want it dont mean that we shld want it.
Lieberman is just a beard for the Democrats.
This was an opportunity for Democrats. There were majorities. There was public support. Leadership could have taken away chairs. The party could have taken away election funds. The President could have used the oratory he used on behalf of Lieberman, Wall Street bonus contracts, Rick Warren and keeping Guantanamo open on behalf of real reform. “Progressive” senators could have filibustered. The Progressive Caucus could have voted against the House bill.
I don’t care about words, I care about actions. No one, other than Kunich and Sanders did anything. All of the Democrats, save one, are complicit and Jane is right in saying they should all be challenged in their primaries.
I’m against the bill at this point too.
The health insurers are getting a great deal. In exchange for letting the oldest, sickest, uninsured non-customers buy into Medicare, they get mandates for all young and healthy people to purchase insurance from private monopolies that are allowed to raise premiums and deductibles as high as they want and cap benefits as low as they want.
This setup ensurers Medicare will not be expanded. Insurers will not let captive, profitable customers go. Politicians who were unable to enact real reform with the momentum reform had will not do so when an even richer, more powerful lobby stands before them. Consumers who will be destroyed by paying skyrocketing premiums or facing the collection arm of the insurance industry, the IRS, will not trust anyone who claimed to be a “reformer” this time around.
Lieberman is just a beard for all of the rest of the Democrats in office. He’s the scapegoat, while they do their best to remove every consumer protection from the bill. The Republicans aren’t involved anymore. They weren’t going to get any more votes than they started with. So every concession was not a concession. Pretending they were concessions is just political theater.
Joe wasn’t always a prick. check out Lieberman’s speech when he was running for another term in 2006. He was 100% for it before he was 100% against it. Scroll down to video. How could Bob Schieffer not ask Joe to account for this reversal on health care?
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/lieberman-promised-universal-health/
We should be very careful about getting rid of the filibuster. Remember we have a population of very weak willed and cowardly Democrats and a bunch of nut case Republicans. If we get rid of the filibuster you can bet the Republicans will use it to do some horrifying things. Imagine a Rep House, Senate and White House – there goes Social Security, Medicare, and anything we care about.
Item:
Mitch McConnell filed a cloture motion this afternoon (Sunday) on a Senator Crapo motion to commit that has been on the floor (along with Dorgan’s drug reimportation amendment) since last Tuesday evening without receiving a vote.
[I'm going to try to get out a Seminal diary on the further details of this soon, but this should send red flags waving about the good faith of the Democrats in this "debate and amendment" process.]
There has not been a single vote on a single amendment to the Senate health reform bill since last Tuesday afternoon shortly after Senator Nelson’s abortion amendment was tabled, though the Senate has been in session every day since (including this Saturday and Sunday).
I am of the opinion that congress only cares about congress. It is a house of narcissits. Where have all of our caring leaders gone? Answer, In the pockets of the lobbyist. We deserve better.
I hate to tell You but You have a really sick way of passing the buck to those You probably pulled the lever for.
Those assholes in Washington could not have done, and do what they are doing had not the people put them in there.
We have become the most stupid Country on the planet because we like our system, politics and Government and support all of it. Then have the balls to blame them and it for our failures.
We are a country of sick puppies and deserve what we get because we no longer will fight to keep our Government ours. We have given it to politicians and big money interests, and then wonder why they took what we gave them.
Which “pre-compromise”? If you mean taking sp off the table, I didn’t support that; Congress/WH made that decision long before I began any serious writing on health reform. Many of my posts since have argued for reconsidering the arguments/rationale for sp, because the logic of sp would point to what they needed to do, even they stayed in the Public Option framework.
Speak for yourself, but don’t put words in the mouths of the rest of us.
Especially here. You’ve been around here long enough to know better.
Sorry if I affended You. I didn’t mean to put words in anyone mouth, they seem to be real good at that themselves.
Call me a crazy optimist, but I remember when the public option was supposed to be dead and Reid kept it in there, to everyone’s surprise. Now it MAY be that his plan was, we’ll mollify them (i.e., those who actually mean it when they say they want affordable health care for all in this country) by pretending to entertain a real pubic option, and that will be enough for us to go ahead and let it get kicked to the curb by politicians who are primarily wary of the impact of affordable health care on insurance companies. But that does not make sense to me. He could have let it die way back then. Maybe he means what he says. Even that is possible.
i mean fdl’s pre-compromise. aug 2008.
p.s. sorry for the third question. curiosity is my middle name. did you by any chance go to the take back america conference in 2008?
thanks pow wow.
Good. I’d like to see the R”s try to eliminate SS and Medicare. I can just hear the silverbacks now. A greater caterwauling ye would never experience!
And it would be one more crime to point to and say “SEE people? See what violence they do to our class? Crap, let’s bring this thing to a head.
Otherwise, we continue with this endless slow drip of death and injustice throughout the land. And at this rate we will NEVER get meaningful health care reform.
I don’t think we have the luxury of playing it safe anymore.
The filibuster is NOT in the Constitution. The Founders did not foresee a corporate favored paralysis as the operating mode of the nation. A landscape without the filibuster MAY have unforeseen perils. But life with the filibuster is becoming intolerable, with perils all too visible.
I think it is time to sail from the shore. Take a chance.
The post above is exactly right. Those who are saying we should keep the filibuster because we may need it someday should explain why the damned thing is morally right. It IS undemocratic. And it’s in the way.
This country, and this world, is in deep trouble. We need to swing for the fences.
Scarecrow, you waste so much time spreading normative Democratic establishment talking points. The filibuster is not to blame for the weak HCR bills. Of course there are those that don’t want meaningful reform. They would be Republicans, Blue Dogs, Conserva Dem Sens and the Obama Administration. The people that failed us are the progressives in congress who enabled these sham bills to come forth. They took a strong hand and folded. The Obama Administration stands to be hurt the most by failure to pass a bill, not the progressives. Yet, as usual, it is the progressives that take it on the chin for the team. The filibuster is an important tool to protect the minority from being steamrolled. The failure of HCR is a function of the bad actors we have in our government and the weakness of progressives to stand and fight and use the filibuster when necessary.
not the Rs. it will be the Ds. they’ve been telegraphing it for months with their calls for “entitlement reform.” please don’t forget who it was that got nafta through (after the Rs could not), the cfma 2000 (to prevent otc financial derivatives like cds from regulation), the enron loophole, the repeal of glass steagall, media consolidation, etc.
the filibuster is supposed to allow a determined minority the right to be heard, not the right to permanently block legislation. the dem leadership is just using it as an excuse for not doing what the were elected to do. calls to get rid of the filibuster (instead of fixing it) are not going to fix the problem, which is the dem leadership and not the rules.
And the bad men they are given to choose between.
Good points. The Dems probably ARE the deadlier poison. But I say “Whoever!”
All those actions you mentioned-NAFTA, Glass-steagall repeal, derivatives etc. They were all very important and damaging, but they did’nt mean a damn thing to the guy/gal in the street. But I think SS and medicare do touch a nerve in the population. Old folks squawk. Loudly.
It’s all dicey, I admit.
nafta and welfare reform did mean something obvious to ordinary people. and it was the dems during the clinton administration that made serious inroads in privatizing medicare. they just didn’t call it that.
i did not mean to compare the Ds to the Rs, but rather compare our response to the bad acts of the Ds vs our response to the bad acts of the Rs. we don’t defend ordinary people from the Ds like we do from the Rs. and that, i think, is what makes the Ds more dangerous to SS and medicare.
re dicey. i and many others are going to depend on SS and medicare for survival. please don’t encourage risky games with them. that’s a personal as well as political plea.
see my comment @6.
Ah. To tell you the truth, I never read that thread and don’t think I was even focused on the issue back then.
Thanks, but the post was not meant as a generic attack on the filibuster; that’s a debate for another day. Given where we’re stuck in health care, it looks like the use of reconciliation will be needed to get anything touching health reform out of the Senate.
I’m not sure where you think we disagree on fundamentals. I might even agree that my posting on this topic is a waste of time.
oh. thanks a lot for that reply. if you count your involvement from around june (without checking that’s when i remember you starting to write on the subject), then you may have just cleared up a lot of my confusion (mostly regarding our conversations that began with me writing something like, “this past year….”).
btw, i disagree with cbsunglass. even when i disagree with you, i like to read your posts on this topic and i especially appreciated your posts relating the regulatory issues and your own experiences in ca.
i would agree with you 110% if it wasn’t for one thing — and that’s that almost all the progressive party activists and organizations folded first, more than a year before the progressives in congress did. i might wish, but i don’t expect, the progressives in congress to stand firm when no one has their back because we’ve already bailed. i guess you could blame us, and to a certain extent i do. but those i judge the harshest are those who ran the con.
But take one pause and consider that when the progressives in congress finally knew that they were being played, it was their responsibility, as representatives of the people, to start playing a different hand. Yes, there have been failures across the progressive spectrum and you and I both know that we will get real HCR when we first turn the cause into a movement and second, when we begin to convince the American people that good and affordable health care is a human right. However, to make the argument that the progressive congressmen need to have their backs covered to do the right thing is a bit of a stretch. They will be weak and ineffective as long as they require backup. One glaring deficiency in building the movement is the lack of many statesmen in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Your point that progressive organizations failed the health care debate, however, is undeniable. We can put HCAN at the leading front of the deceit, controlled, of course, by the largest villain in the whole mess—The Obama Administration. However, I think FDL has had their hearts in the right place, they were just duped. They must know by now that they were played big time and that the movement for real HCR must be split away from the Democratic establishment.
50+1 is not the definition of democracy. Filibusters and super majorities are an important check and balance designed into the system.
Think of political maneouvering using the golden rule…..would you like your opposition to follow these tactics when they are again in power?
no one is at their best when they have no back up, especially politicians. this work, this cause, is imo going to take all of us at our best. which means supporting each other. i’m not trying to absolve the progressives in congress completely, just to apportion the failures fairly because some of it is on us. and the bit that is on me is what i can hope to change.
the democratic party is filled with neoliberal and conservative thinkers (why shouldn’t it be, with republicans having gone batshit crazy?). any progressive who has made the progressive case for universal healthcare this year has been mocked as unserious. even lowly commenters here have been called purity trolls and much worse (i don’t know why honestly calling bullshit is seen as a sign of disloyalty, but that’s another topic). any progressive in congress who has done the same has been the target of mocking, condemnation or has been ignored. i just think that for now we have to look to the leaders outside of the party and outside of party or political activists. this is a human rights campaign and there are plenty of inspiring and smart leaders in that dimension.
and by the way, i figured out, on my own, that HCAN was a con more than a year ago (and said so here in the comments). it was pretty obvious to an outsider, although i can see how that would not be the case for the people the con targeted if they had no previous independent understanding of the policy issues involved — groupthink is a powerful thing. i recently listened to the talks at tba 2008 (they’re online) and some others and now think i have a better appreciation about how the con was probably run.
so, yeah, i think a lot of people were duped. but while HCAN (and the Heridon Alliance) may have been the leading front of the deceit, they came first — long before the obama administration. we have some serious problems at democratic party affiliated think tanks and similar. just look at the bogus climate and economic proposals — not progressive, not workable and won’t fix the problems they are supposed to address. and worse, some of them are even downright conservative, like “buy american.”
how can we learn from this experience? because if we don’t i think it’s going to happen to us again and again. and i’m fed up with seeing neoliberal policies labeled progressive and the progressives who want to talk about progressive policies told to stfu and fall in line. that’s not a fight i want to keep having.
Over at Politics Daily
John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff who ran President Obama’s transition and still advises the administration on health care and other issues, today expressed confidence that a health care bill will pass despite the news that Sen. Joe Lieberman will filibuster any legislation with a public health insurance option or a Medicare buy-in for 55 year-olds.
Get the new
PD toolbar!”My guess is that musty folders on reconciliation got dusted off this morning,” Podesta told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. The reference was to a budget procedure that requires only 51 votes to pass and can’t be filibustered.
We all know we have bad choices to vote for, but alot of that is our fault to.
The people in Washington that are on tenth terms, aren’t still their because we had bad choices. They are there because the voters didn’t have the wisdom to remove them, and kept re-elceting them. This is true in both parties.
You see even our Constitution meant for them to go to Washington for a short time as citizen representatives. It didn’t re-elect them and make them almost life time members. The only people who can take the blame for that are the voters. The voters want to blame everyone else for the mess our Government is in, but won’t admit that it was they that allowed it to become what it is.
Only the wisdom of the voters, by waking up to the fact that the people they voted for are the problem, and the parties they suport, and the politics they participate in, are why we have the mess.
ASK yourself. How can any American in their right mind sware they are a Republican or Democrat, and support those in the Congress, and still try to make people believe they love this Country?
The politics made for us by those parties, and the division they have pushed us into, are killing the very Country we proclaim to love.