It remains to be seen if the House Democrats were prescient and justified in doing this as the Republicans lined up to vote for passage of the American Health Care Act.
Democrats on the House floor signing "Na-na-na, na-na-na, hey, hey, goodbye."
— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) May 4, 2017
Josh Marshall explained the full significance of the chant:
This is both an homage and a literal repetition of what Republicans did when the Clinton tax bill passed in the House in 1993. Same singing, same song. The bill paved the way for budget balancing over the course of the decade and (more arguably) played a role in creating the prosperity of that decade. It also came little more than a year before Democratic majorities in both Houses were annihilated in the 1994 midterm.
It’s an inside joke unless you have good recall of something that happened a quarter century ago during the first year of the Clinton presidency, so it’s kind of cool to see. But it presumes that history will repeat itself in other ways–that’s the annihilation part of the story.
For more on that, you should peruse the roll call to see who just put their neck under the guillotine. On the whole, though, the House just did what they needed to do, which is get this issue off their plate and put it in the lap of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who is probably gritting his teeth in anguish right about now.
If the bill dies in the Senate, the House members should be grateful. They’ll have kept their promise to the base without having to face the consequences of actually killing a large number of people. That’s the best they could hope for under the circumstances. If it passes the Senate, though, they’ll likely find that the people who voted no are the first to lose, and not because they voted no. It’s just that most of them are somewhat politically vulnerable, and the voters won’t really care too much how they voted compared to how much they care about which party they serve.
Can democrats politic?
McConnell isn’t gritting his teeth in anguish, jeez! He’s laughing out loud, slapping his buddies on the back, and waiting for Trump to visit the senators to make that vote more viable than ever for them.
I’m hearing lots of people dismissing this loss for the decent people in this country, but it’s a big boost to Republicans and a slam dunk for Trump. And whatever version gets sent to the Senate, we know ot will still suck. So I’m neither relieved nor consoled.
Correct. The senate exists to pass legislation, what republican will dare risk being known as THE vote that saved Obamacare?
Hopefully, Heller, Collins and Murkowski
Maybe Capito who rightly knows just how bad off W. Va is.
And of course the first Democrat signals his willingness to negotiate:
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/332034-dem-senator-im-open-to-repealing-replacing-obama
care
Improving? If an honest effort, no problem. But there’s no reason it needs to be repealed to be improved. This is why the Republicans are winning and the Democrats are not. No solidarity. No standing strong for well articulated principles. If he wants to improve it, let him name specific measures he’s propose.
Two things. 1. Montana. 2. Could be the GOP strategy of being open to voting for it but just using that to stall. By all means spend months negotiating with him for nothing.
An interesting list:
This is why I don’t believe the chant. Most of the margins in the House are more than 10.
Colorado 6th is a purple district. One we’ve come close to turning blue.
Clinton won it by 9.
I will bet he retires.
He beat an outstanding Democratic candidate by 9 points. He still gets votes from people whose interests he votes against, with the exception of the ACA. He had enough sense to vote against that because his constituents were pretty loud about their opposition to demolition of the ACA.
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/08/mike-coffman-morgan-carroll-congress-election-results/
Awesome response.
Thank you.
Most welcome. And thank you for the praise.
interesting about Will Hurd. evidently also against the wall. his website has him in favor of ACA repeal, perhaps a repeal that doesn’t throw all his constituents out of coverage. he didn’t look like he was thinking of retiring on bipartisan roadtrip, in fact he looked like the kind of guy we want in Congress. where does a guy like that go in the T era?
Health Care is a make or break issue in a way: you can’t hide.
Clinton carried the district, and Obama nearly did.
How many of that greater than 15% group won with 100% (or 97%) because they were unopposed on the ballot?
25 GOP members won more than 75%
24 Dems won by more than 75
I don’t think there’s the slightest chance that a clusterfuck like the house bill could get out of the Senate.
Seems like Republican Senators agree.
Senate Republicans To Scrap House Repeal Bill, Start From Scratch
This bill isn’t getting out of the Senate. However, it’s possible a less horrible but still very bad bill could make it out, and then get through the House under similar conditions to those that passed this one. That could be a lot of harm to a lot of people until we can reverse it, which would be 2021 plus the time to implement at the earliest. If this had failed, Obamacare would have been safe at least legislatively indefinitely.
Yeah this was always the problem. It would have been nice if dysfunction in the house had prevented forward progress completely but now that things are in the senate they’re going to be able to do some damage.
Part of the reason the house bill made it out was because attention had wandered. Not only is it hard to keep people’s attention fixed on one thing (especially when Trump and friends are committing new outrages hourly) but a lot of people thought the bill was dead and buried.
I’d like to think that mistake won’t be made again with the Senate.
I didn’t expect that (but should have, considering what a shit sandwich the House bill is).
Boo, what do you think is likely to be in a bill that the Senate CAN pass with 51 votes only – since that seems to be what they are going for.
Thanks!
IANAB, but I think the Senate Republicans could pass something like Cassidy-Collins, which basically allows states to opt out of Obamacare along with some other comparatively mild adjustments.Then it goes to conference and who knows what comes out. If I had to guess, I’d predict Cassidy-Collins state opt outs plus major Medicaid cuts, but not completely obliterating Medicaid like the House bill.
None of this would probably pass the Byrd rule, but as several have pointed out, McConnell will just keep on firing the parliamentarian until he gets one that will approve it – for which reason the current one will probably approve it.
Sorry (but wait, why should I be sorry?), but you violated one of my pet peeves, i.e., undefined-acronym abuse, with that one.
Often I can come up with a reasonable guess. Not this time, not for that one.
Rule: the more obscure or parochial the acronym, the more it is incumbent on its user to define it upon first use (then feel free to make it every other word if you like . . . within the same comment, that is). Obviously, universally understood acronyms like FBI, CIA, NRA, etc., don’t demand definition for each first use. But just because “everybody” someplace you hang out understands it, that doesn’t mean everybody here hangs out there, too.
</rant>
I hope you’re right. At the moment, I would urge caution. A lot depends on what can actually get considered under reconciliation, what the CBO scoring looks like (there apparently is some scuttlebutt that the bill just passed may actually increase the deficit, which would be problematic), and how those Senators who are supposedly on the fence react. Nothing’s a done deal, but so far no one has shot the proverbial zombie bill in the head either.
. . . increase the deficit, which would be problematic . . . “
These are hypocritical, dishonest GOPers we’re talking about here. Deficits are only “problematic” when incurred under Dem preznits or Dem Congressional majorities. TOKIYARIP [“They’re OK if you’re a Republican . . . in power” –Darth Cheney paraphrase]. History going back several decades has repeatedly demonstrated this.
(Granting you may have meant “problematic” wrt passage. But not valid, imo, wrt GOP support of passage, even in the Senate. It could be a useful lever, tho, if Dems were smart enough to leverage the GOP hypocrisy without embracing the idiotic dogma. Alas, not likely imo. Too many Dems drank that kool-aid, a la Bowles-Simpson.)
There is a double standard when it comes to accountability to consider. We’ll have to wait and see how well the Democratic legislators and so on leverage that sort of info – and deal with the realization that even if played smartly might still not get a fair reception from those motivated to not listen. Still – the clowns who voted for this clusterf*ck of a bill who spent their careers whining about deficits may have produced a bill that would do the very thing they claim to be against (increasing deficit spending) that is enormously unpopular (and with good reason) with the public.
The GOP’s failure to even wait for a CBO score exposes their hypocrisy. They’re hypocrites who would kill grandma. They’re hypocrites who would throw people with any of a number of disabilities under the bus. They’re hypocrites who would allow insurance companies to deny our sisters, daughters, nieces and so on health coverage if they get raped. It really does not get more stark than that. Tell it like it is. This is a bill designed to hurt anyone but the very rich. Hang that as an albatross around each and every one of those f*ckers’ necks. Sorry for my coarse language. In a bit of a mood these days.
no matter how upset I am about this thing passing, I oppose that singing thing. this should be about all the ppl who are going to be hurt, not about sticking it to the other party. just more of the intolerable endless campaign
The US HOR is a bit like the British House of Commons in that it can be very noisy (the latter is much noisier including barnyard animal sounds) so I have no problems with this, especially since the minority party has no voice at all. The Senate is very different or used to be before the advent of extremist GOP Senators.
No. That’s one reason we lose.
How does reconciliation work again? What’s the step -after- reconciliation?
Reconciliation basically just lets the Senate skip the filibuster. If it gets “through” reconciliation (which normally means it passes the Senate) then it goes to conference, like a normal bill. At that point you’d normally expect something to make it through conference, re-voting by the houses, and go to the President’s desk.
So the House will have to vote again, on the post-conference bill? Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but can’t we count on the right-wing zealots in the House not to vote for anything that comes out of conference?
Yes, that could certainly happen but unless the bill is drastically changed, the Tea Party wing will vote so they can have a win after 7 years.
They might break on the re-vote, and the moderates might break on a bill which has been discussed in detail in public (and on a vote closer to the election). It could fail at that stage, yes, especially since the final bill is likely to be a lot more different from their version than conference bills usually are. But we can’t count on getting saved, either. By that point tax deform will be rattling around and those (literally) murderous healthcare cuts will pay for a lot of tax cuts for millionaires and billionaire. So it might very well pass at that point too.
On the whole I’d say odds are still against any major healthcare deform. But it’s still a lot worse than if the House had failed to pass this.
I don’t understand why anyone expects GOP voters to punish House Republicans for passing a bill that harms them.
It’s not exactly a new development.
Now that I’ve thought about it for a couple hours I note that as a PR stunt at least they haven’t killed any victims yet – unlike the last T after dinner PR stunt.
If they kill the ACA…the insurance companies will flee from the exchanges and the individual market will return to being something only rich healthy people can afford. Another source of pain will be the job losses. The healthcare industry will loose 20 + million paying customers and that means 2-4 million will loose their jobs. The insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmacy industry will dismantle all they built out for ACA paying customers.
that’s why I’m hoping this is a ridiculous 1st inning celebration, otherwise, a lot more victims than that bomb he used for the last stunt
Why does reconciliation apply to this bill in the Senate?
If I recall, it will apply to those facets of the bill that have a bearing on the Federal budget. I suspect that facets of this particular travesty are arguably not related to the budget itself. We’ll have to see what the Senate Parliamentarian makes of this mess.
Reconciliation applies if a bill increases or decreases the budget.
The first thing that will happen is the Parliamentarian will rule on whether everything in the House Bill is germane to the budget. It is unlikely everything will.
They need just 51 votes to pass this piece of shit per MSNBC. Really 50 votes plus Pence. So we need three defections. This is the rich mans bill since it will save billions for them.
That assumes Heitkamp and Manchin don’t vote to pass this PoS. I don’t think they will stick with the party on this one.
Manchin’s state is older, sicker, and poorer than the average. More Medicaid-dependent than the average. And he hasn’t voted for any of the ACA repeal measures that have hit the Senate.
Remind me why he switches again?
Booman!
You were way too complacent about Trump, and this is the same way. If you don’t think McConnell doesn’t want to go down in history as the guy who beat Obama, you are missing the trees and the forest. The Senate will only twist the knife, and the 2018 vote is a perilous ledge to hang your hopes on until these bastards start being actually frog marched somewhere. You of all people should know that.
One more thing…since the term neoliberalism has been used and abused quite a bit here over the years, I would love to offer an observation. Whatever critical works I have read on the topic have in common that the authors note that neoliberalism in practice ends up with a transfer of wealth from the poor and whatever might count as a middle class to the rich, often through the passage of unpopular laws and if necessary through force. The bill that passed today is a textbook example of neoliberalism in practice. It is unpopular according to opinion polls and it will be a massive transfer of wealth to the rich at the expense of the rest of us. To paraphrase oaguabonita, make note that of the two major parties in the US, one consistently has pushed neoliberal policies and the the other has not. You don’t exactly need a doctorate in political science or economics to sort out which is which. Heck, that should be blindingly obvious to anyone with more than a functioning brainstem.
Ya, but emails.
.
One has pushed neoliberal policies consistently while saying if you are poor you are immoral.
The other has done so inconsistently while claiming to be the party of the people who are being robbed.
Is it equivalent? No. But don’t pretend one side is blameless.
Oddly enough oaguabonita and I covered this territory quite aptly a few months ago. There is a lot of territory between stating one side is “blameless” and the sort of false equivalence that has become common practice here. In this case, since we have a textbook case of exactly what neoliberal policy looks like in practice (AHCA is as close to something that any of a number of critics have described as transferring wealth to the rich and being deeply unpopular among the rest of the masses), the contrast between the two parties is as sharp as one could get. No pretense necessary to accept the facts on the ground.
Headline in the Washington Post:
“If Le Pen beats Macron, the once-unthinkable will be all too real”
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/05/if-le-pen-beats-macron-the-once-unthink
able-will-be-all-too-real
Hey, guess what WaPo … the once unthinkable is already real. Trump beat Hillary. Or had you forgotten? Oh yes, I know. Trump is the new normal, so it’s no longer unthinkable. Because with the major media, it’s always Groundhog Day.
“Jean-Luc aurais gagné.”
See The New Yorker article at the link below. Sounds too much like Clinton vs Trump. Le Pen is a demagoguge who has made promises she cannot fill and Macron is a big money person who doesn’t seem to have the capacity to relate to the constituents.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/emmanuel-macron-and-the-modern-family
It really does, and yet Macron won handily. France is definitely a different country.
No electoral college for one.
If the bill dies in the Senate, I’ll sure be grateful. Finally, something both sides can agree on.