Lefties Threatening To Bail On Obamacare
It’s probably a political stunt designed to make a hideous piece of legislation look moderate and reasonable, but the Harry Reid version of Obamacare is now being assaulted – from the Left.
With the recent compromises of throwing out both a public option and the expansion of Medicare in the past few days, the far left of the Democrat Party has now fallen off the reservation – and they’re now speaking out publicly against the plan.
Said former Democratic National Committee chair and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean:
“This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. Honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.”
Reid, and the moonbats at places like the Daily Kos, Democratic Underground or the Huffington Post, aren’t the only game in town. Today, tainted Illinois Sen. Roland Burris - who was appointed to fill the seat vacated when Barack Obama was elected President – exploded an irony bomb by issuing forth a sermon on ethics and “fundamentals:”
“I am committed to voting for a bill that achieves the goals of a public option: competition, cost savings and accountability,” he said. “I will not be able to vote for lesser legislation that ignores those fundamentals.”He added: “My colleagues may have forged a compromise bill that can achieve the 60 votes that will be needed for it to pass. But until this bill addresses cost, competition and accountability in a meaningful way, it will not win mine.”With a dramatic flourish, Mr. Burris said: “As Mohandas Gandhi once famously said, ‘All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender.’”
It would be wrong to assume all this signals the death of Obamacare. It’s not dead yet, and it might well survive all this to pass in some form. Assuming, however, that we’re seeing the plan fall apart, it’s a great lesson on how not to effect legislation.
The American people have never been behind the socialization of the medical sector. Various push-polls have been done in order to propagandize support for a “public option” or “universal coverage” and so on, but at the end of the day it’s only the hard-core left who really want to see health care turned over the public sector. This is a country, after all, where 76 percent of the public believes the free market does a better job of allocating resources within an economy.
So there was never support for this program on philosophical grounds, and what is more the Democrats have always known this. As Obama himself said, “seven different presidents failed” to impose socialized medicine on the American people, which ought to be a clue for even the dumbest lefty that the American people disagree with them on their views on health care and always will.
But what the Left did have going for them at the beginning of this odyssey was a popular president in Obama. And but for this ridiculous overreach on health care policy, which could easily have been moved forward in pieces without raising the ire of the American people and precipitating the resurgence of the conservative movement, Obama might still be a popular president.
But now that he’s no longer popular but “controversial” or “divisive” (or “cratering”), what we are beginning to see with this president is that he no longer commands the allegiance of his ideological compatriots. This should not be a problem for Obama, as he is of the same feather with Burris, Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold and the other socialists in the Democrat Party – but when Rasmussen puts out a poll with the president holding a 44 percent approval rating, the lefties are going to be free to play to their base and make noise.
In any event, one thing is patently obvious – with this kind of confusion and chaos afoot, contrived or not, there is absolutely no argument to be made for re-ordering one-sixth of the American economy. For once the Howard Deans and Markos Koulitsases of the world are right; it’s time to throw out this bill and start over in an effort to pass something the American people can actually support.
This is the issue that awakened me from my blissful slumber and caused me to get involved in the process. That is the only good that has come from it in my mind. May it die a flaming death, and may the countless others like me, that "sleeping giant " that has been awakened, and "is mad as hell and won't take it any more," continue the good fight.
This bill needs to die, and the party of "no" needs to introduce new, meaningful, workable alternatives.
Like I said, I think this is a ploy. I think this is designed to make Obamacare look centrist and to make the Republicans look out of the mainstream.
And hopefully, Mitch McConnell will take a whiff of this BS and employ whatever delaying and obstruction tactics he can to ruin the bill.
If the republicans had a spine they would drag the senate to a stand still.
But, if they knew how to act like the republicans we want, they wouldn't have lost control, and we wouldn't have had to fire so many of them last election.
It's beginning to look like they're starting to drag. Coburn's move today coupled with DeMint and Thune coming right out and saying everything's coming out now tells you they think the time is right.
The time has been right, though. It's been right for a good three months.