There is as much anger on this site as we've seen since the heady PUMA days. Everyone is calling the bill inadequate to what we want. Some are saying it's worth killing the bill (including Markos and Dean).
But killing the bill is bad idea in light of the history of how change occurs within the Madisonian framework that we have to labor under in DC.
This is how change happens. Slowly, painfully and frustratingly.
If you haven't read Atul Gawande's piece in The New Yorker, you need to.
Here's a link:
http://www.newyorker.com/...
In it, he compares HCR with agricultural reform. He points out that the ag sector in the early 20th century was a mess, dragging down productivity and costing too much. He then talks about how a few pilot programs demonstrated the viability of change. Within 30 years, the agricultural sector was completely transformed.
I would point to one of Obama's heroes as another example of how change occurs.
Lincoln was - like Obama - a tempermentally moderate from Illinois.
He struggled with moderates and liberals (called radicals back then) on the issue of slavery. Even with a Civil War going on, he was slow to move for various reasons. The Liebermans of his day were the border states who stayed in the Union and owned slaves. Their veto power was secession.
Lincoln slow walked his way to ending slavery. First, he called runaway slaves contraband. Then his Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only where he had no power to do so: in the Confederacy. Only by the end of the war was ending slavery completely a possibility.
Even in the midst of a war, with most of the slaveholding states absent from Congress, Lincoln had to move very slowly. Even in the crucible of war.
So, the current bill doesn't give us what we want.
But it moves the goalposts. Drags the Overton Window. You name it.
And let's consider this: What if they had passed the Lieberman Compromise HCR in 1994? The bill we hate now. Passed in 1994.
What would happen is that now we could build on that. We would have THAT as a base from which to move the standards forward a little more.
Back to Lincoln and slavery. Slavery ended in 1865 for good. But it would be another century before all the rights granted Freedmen would be made tangible and real. It's the great tragedy of America that it took that long.
But when the Civil Rights movement began, they had powerful weapons, mostly the 14th Amendment. The 14th had been widely ignored and warped until the 1950s. But the arrow was there. All it need was the right archer.
The reforms that were passed in the 1860s and 1870s bore no fruit at first. But eventually they did.
If we "Kill the Bill!" We start over again. With nothing. No movement leftwards. No reforms to build on later.
We pride ourselves on being "the reality based community". Well, the reality is, we can't get the reform we want. Maybe even not the reform we need.
But we can move things a little bit. More than Roosevelt did. More than Truman did. More than Carter did. More than Clinton did.
It's not what we want, but it's not "nothing". It's a start.