Democrats are not big on the idea of premptive strikes, but as KO mentioned tonight many of us learn in the fourth grade or thereabouts that the bully is probably going to beat you up and take your lunch money whether you fight back or not.
This whole debate on the public option should have been a debate on single payer. Why is it necessary to preserve private insurance, bail out banks, write consumer protection so it really protects credit card companies ability to sock you with 30% interest retroactively without notice, keep fighting in Afghanistan at a cost of $10 billion dollars a month and not a few American lives; so we can avoid being called partisan?
If we get a healthcare bill that doesn't work its going to be like a vacine against democratic legislation. If we get a bill that does work it becomes one more piece of a sucessful package that includes turning the economy around, creating good jobs, helping people who make less than $250,000 a year survive, and actually finding the savings to allow us to go on and fight global warming, end the wars, save the environment and begin working on alternative energy, housing, and education.
Obama is wavering. He has surrounded himself with the best and the brightest only to discover that the best and the brightest were the lobiests first targets.
Thank goodness for Weiner pointing out that there are more votes against healthcare without a public option than there are votes against healthcare with a public option.
I find Weiner has a knack for getting to the heart of the matter.
How many times have we whined that its time to find a spine, use it to stand erect, grow a pair and fight for a bill that will work.
If we show America that they can fill the House and Senate with Democrats, elect a Democratic President and still not get our first priority, a healthcare bill that works passed, then all we have proved is that there is no point in voting for Democrats.
I'll allow I'm getting a lot of negative spin from the media. Its making me mad and I'm sure its making the people showing up at town halls with guns mad.
Screw the bipartisan diplomacy, go with the
reconciliation, damm the torpedoes full speed ahead.
To trigger the reconciliation process, Congress passes a concurrent resolution on the budget instructing one or more committees to report changes in law affecting the budget by a certain date. If the budget instructs more than one committee, then those committees send their recommendations to the Budget Committee of their House, and the Budget Committee packages the recommendations into a single omnibus bill. In the Senate, the reconciliation bill then gets only 20 hours of debate, and amendments are limited. Because reconciliation limits debate and amendment, the process empowers the majority party.
Until 1996, reconciliation was limited to deficit reduction, but in 1996 the Senate adopted a precedent to apply reconciliation to any legislation affecting the budget, even legislation that would worsen the deficit. Under the administration of President George W. Bush Congress used reconciliation to enact three major tax cuts. Efforts to use reconciliation to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling failed.
Byrd Rule
Further information: Sunset provision#The Budget Act and the Byrd Rule
Reconciliation generally involves legislation that changes the budget deficit (or conceivably, the surplus). The "Byrd Rule" (2 U.S.C. § 644) outlines what reconciliation can and cannot be used for. The Byrd Rule defines a provision to be extraneous in six cases:
(1) if it does not produce a change in outlays or revenues;
(2) if it produces an outlay increase or revenue decrease when the instructed committee is not in compliance with its instructions;
(3) if it is outside the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure;
(4) if it produces a change in outlays or revenues which is merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision;
(5) if it would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure, though the provisions in question may receive an exception if they in total in a Title of the measure net to a reduction in the deficit; and
(6) if it recommends changes in Social Security.
If a provision violates the Byrd Rule, then any Senator may raise a procedural objection and unless 60 Senators vote to waive the objection, then the offending provision will be stripped from the bill.