Senate blows through DEFCON-1, nukes itself

[Captain ******* Kirk]

You'll see.

[Sava]

You'll see.

See what? Time is on Obama's side. He just has to fix a website. The other side has to keep anti-Obamacare anger sustained... and somehow use it to win elections despite overwhelming odds.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

The fact that you think the website is the only problem with Obamacare makes me question your judgment on the larger issue. There are other, bigger problems with Obamacare that will become more visible once the website is finally working.

[Guynemer]

Websites get fixed.

True.

Most of the individual items in Obamacare, people like.

Very true.

All you guys have is a name that doesn't poll as popular as "Affordable Care Act".

True.

That's not a strategy that's going to be effective in the long term.

Couldn't be wronger. Laughably false. None more false.

Repealing the legislation would take such a ground-swell, it's really not feasible.

To be determined.

The best you can do now is use it as a fundraising tool... which is what people, the likes of Ted Cruz, are doing.

True.

If you honestly think the Republicans will overcome their colossal failures in adapting to changing demographics and losing the culture war... well... then you are deluded.

To be determined.

But there are plenty of hilariously offensive examples of Republican ineptitude to choose from.

Extremely true.

[Sava]

The fact that you think the website is the only problem with Obamacare makes me question your judgment on the larger issue. There are other, bigger problems with Obamacare that will become more visible once the website is finally working.

But people only care about the website. That's the anger point. Do you even watch TV? Use the internet?

Nobody cares about the intricacies involving how the ACA affects the private insurance market. Good luck trying to get Joe Schmoe all pissed off about some minor detail... that itself is only relevant because the private insurance market itself is the problem. ACA's ultimate failure is that it is a band aid to a broken system.

It has some legitimate improvements that will benefit many more people than it hurts.

And even if people are still mad, do you think everyone will vote Republican? They're the ones who think you should die homeless in the streets.

[Sava]

That's not a strategy that's going to be effective in the long term.

Couldn't be wronger. Laughably false. None more false.

Care to explain? The news cycle is about 2 weeks. The Obamacare rollout story is on its way out. Nobody is going to care about it in 3 months, let alone 3 years.

Repealing the legislation would take such a ground-swell, it's really not feasible.

To be determined.

What is to be determined? Do you need a lesson in how government works? Passing meaningful legislation, especially in today's climate, require a single party to control both the House and Senate (60 votes) and Presidency. That's very difficult to do.

If you honestly think the Republicans will overcome their colossal failures in adapting to changing demographics and losing the culture war... well... then you are deluded.

To be determined.

It's a reasonable assumption. Are Republicans going to suddenly start being not racist? Are they going to support a decent immigration reform that doesn't make them out to be xenophobic asshats? My money is on.... not.

Furthermore, government rarely undoes things. Prohibition is one of the rare examples... and that took a Constitutional amendment.

[Guynemer]

Care to explain? The news cycle is about 2 weeks. The Obamacare rollout story is on its way out. Nobody is going to care about it in 3 months, let alone 3 years.

You implied that the strategy of calling it Obamacare as opposed to ACA is not effective. That is obviously wrong.

What is to be determined? Do you need a lesson in how government works? Passing meaningful legislation, especially in today's climate, require a single party to control both the House and Senate (60 votes) and Presidency. That's very difficult to do.

Filibuster rules can be changed, and there's a very good chance they will be. If you don't think the GOP will control both houses of Congress after the 2014 midterms, well, I hope you're right, but I ain't holding my breath. 2016 will be the determining factor.

It's a reasonable assumption. Are Republicans going to suddenly start being not racist? Are they going to support a decent immigration reform that doesn't make them out to be xenophobic asshats? My money is on.... not.

That's a smart bet, but it isn't a sure thing.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

But people only care about the website. That's the anger point.

Actually, the anger point is people not being able to keep their insurance. Things are going to get even worse when the stories start coming out about people not being able to keep their doctors or hospitals.

[DinoDoc]

All you guys have is a name that doesn't poll as popular as "Affordable Care Act". That's not a strategy that's going to be effective in the long term. Repealing the legislation would take such a ground-swell, it's really not feasible.

I suppose that is the reason the WH has stopped calling it Obamacare. FTR: Repeal wouldn't take anymore of a groundswell than passing it did.

[Sava]

You implied that the strategy of calling it Obamacare as opposed to ACA is not effective. That is obviously wrong.

I didn't imply anything. You inferred it. Please respond to something I actually said, not something your syphilitic brain imagined.

What is to be determined? Do you need a lesson in how government works? Passing meaningful legislation, especially in today's climate, require a single party to control both the House and Senate (60 votes) and Presidency. That's very difficult to do.

Filibuster rules can be changed, and there's a very good chance they will be. If you don't think the GOP will control both houses of Congress after the 2014 midterms, well, I hope you're right, but I ain't holding my breath. 2016 will be the determining factor.

The early projections show Democrats holding a majority in the Senate. The House is a different story. The Republicans will likely lose seats, but not enough to lose the majority. If you don't follow sites that deal with this subject, I can't do the work for you in explaining this. I'm just repeating what I've read elsewhere... by people who do this sort of thing for a living.

That's a smart bet, but it isn't a sure thing.

It's sure enough.

[Sava]

I suppose that is the reason the WH has stopped calling it Obamacare. FTR: Repeal wouldn't take anymore of a groundswell than passing it did.

The Democrats were in a unique situation from 2008-2010. The Bush presidency was a colossal failure. I mean, the Democrats ran a black guy whose middle name is Hussein... and won.

I'm sure on all the right wing circle jerk blogs you read, Obamacare is a punch line. But the thing is, it's not such a massively negative event as the Great Bush Depression (LOL), the War in Iraq, the failure in Afghanistan...

At this point, the Republicans are trying really really hard to convince people the ACA is bad and a failure. They are trying really hard to make it fail. Ultimately, it's not bad. Even Ted Cruz admits as much. You can perhaps get some traction in the short term hammering away at something. But again, if you think that is going to translate into a historic electoral shift... you are deluding yourself.

[Ben Kenobi]

Nobody cares about the intricacies involving how the ACA affects the private insurance market.

Couple things.

1. People care about premiums. They were told and believed that:

a) if they liked their current plan they could keep it. This means that they didn't believe there would be negative effects surrounding the implementation of Obamacare. I was on here hollering about how, yes, costs were going to increase dramatically and more people were going to lose insurance than gain. So far I've been absolutely right. People have lost coverage and that's a big deal.

b) that the health care would be free. That's not the case. Lots of people out there thought that it was free candy they were supporting and now they find out there's a price tag associated with it.

c) that not only is there a price tag - but that it is much higher than their current insurance. As in sticker shock.

The website is really meaningless at this point. People don't care that they can't log on to get their free obamacare. They care that they are getting a crappier deal and that deductables are sky high.

This is why Democrats are staring down electoral defeat in 2014, not because the website rollout is a cluster****. That's the turd pickle on the Obamacare **** sandwich.

[Wiglaf]

The hypocrisy is complete

New york times, 2013

Democracy Returns to the Senate
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
For five years, Senate Republicans have refused to allow confirmation votes on dozens of perfectly qualified candidates nominated by President Obama for government positions. They tried to nullify entire federal agencies by denying them leaders. They abused Senate rules past the point of tolerance or responsibility. And so they were left enraged and threatening revenge on Thursday when a majority did the only logical thing and stripped away their power to block the president’s nominees.

In a 52-to-48 vote that substantially altered the balance of power in Washington, the Senate changed its most infuriating rule and effectively ended the filibuster on executive and judicial appointments. From now on, if any senator tries to filibuster a presidential nominee, that filibuster can be stopped with a simple majority, not the 60-vote requirement of the past. That means a return to the democratic process of giving nominees an up-or-down vote, allowing them to be either confirmed or rejected by a simple majority.

The only exceptions are nominations to the Supreme Court, where a filibuster would still be allowed. But now that the Senate has begun to tear down undemocratic procedures, the precedent set on Thursday will increase the pressure to end those filibusters, too.

This vote was long overdue. “I have waited 18 years for this moment,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa.

It would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, when the majority leader, Harry Reid, was still holding out hope for a long-lasting deal with Republicans and insisting that federal judges, because of their lifetime appointments, should still be subject to supermajority thresholds. But Mr. Reid, along with all but three Senate Democrats, was pushed to act by the Republicans’ refusal to allow any appointments to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, just because they wanted to keep a conservative majority on that important court.

That move was as outrageous as the tactic they used earlier this year to try to cripple the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which they despise) by blocking all appointments to those agencies. That obstruction was removed in July when Mr. Reid threatened to end the filibuster and Republicans backed down. The recent blockade of judges to the D.C. appellate court was the last straw.

Republicans warned that the rule change could haunt the Democrats if they lose the White House and the Senate. But the Constitution gives presidents the right to nominate top officials in their administration and name judges, and says nothing about the ability of a Senate minority to stop them. (The practice barely existed before the 1970s.) From now on, voters will have to understand that presidents are likely to get their way on nominations if their party controls the Senate. Given the extreme degree of Republican obstruction during the Obama administration, the Democrats had little choice but to change the filibuster rule. As Mr. Reid noted on the floor, half of all filibusters waged against nominations in Senate history have occurred since Mr. Obama was elected. Twenty of his district court nominees were filibustered; only three such filibusters took place before he took office. There has also been a record-setting amount of delay in approving the president’s choices for cabinet positions and federal agency posts, even in cases when no objections were raised about a nominee’s qualifications.

The rule change does not end the 60-vote threshold for blocking legislation, which we have argued is worth preserving. But the vote may lead to broader filibuster changes. A proposal by several younger Democratic senators to require “talking filibusters” — forcing objecting lawmakers to stand up at length and make their cases — may well gain steam now, and could finally spell an end to logjams that have prevented important legislation from reaching votes.

Democrats made the filibuster change with a simple-majority vote, which Republicans insisted was a violation of the rules. There is ample precedent for this kind of change, though it should be used judiciously. Today’s vote was an appropriate use of that power, and it was necessary to turn the Senate back into a functioning legislative body.

Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »

New York Times, 2005

EDITORIAL
The Senate on the Brink

The White House's insistence on choosing only far-right judicial nominees has already damaged the federal courts. Now it threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress. The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. Republicans and Democrats should tone down their rhetoric, then sit down and negotiate.

President Bush likes to complain about the divisive atmosphere in Washington. But he has contributed to it mightily by choosing federal judges from the far right of the ideological spectrum. He started his second term with a particularly aggressive move: resubmitting seven nominees whom the Democrats blocked last year by filibuster.

The Senate has confirmed the vast majority of President Bush's choices. But Democrats have rightly balked at a handful. One of the seven renominated judges is William Myers, a former lobbyist for the mining and ranching industries who demonstrated at his hearing last week that he is an antienvironmental extremist who lacks the evenhandedness necessary to be a federal judge. Another is Janice Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as "our socialist revolution."

To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. Republican leaders now claim that judicial nominees are entitled to an up-or-down vote. This is rank hypocrisy. When the tables were turned, Republicans filibustered President Bill Clinton's choice for surgeon general, forcing him to choose another. And Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who now finds judicial filibusters so offensive, himself joined one against Richard Paez, a Clinton appeals court nominee.

Yet these very same Republicans are threatening to have Vice President Dick Cheney rule from the chair that a simple majority can confirm a judicial nominee rather than the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster. This is known as the "nuclear option" because in all likelihood it would blow up the Senate's operations. The Senate does much of its work by unanimous consent, which keeps things moving along and prevents ordinary day-to-day business from drowning in procedural votes. But if Republicans change the filibuster rules, Democrats could respond by ignoring the tradition of unanimous consent and making it difficult if not impossible to get anything done. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has warned that "the Senate will be in turmoil and the Judiciary Committee will be hell."

Despite his party's Senate majority, however, Mr. Frist may not have the votes to go nuclear. A sizable number of Republicans - including John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee and John Warner - could break away. For them, the value of confirming a few extreme nominees may be outweighed by the lasting damage to the Senate. Besides, majorities are temporary, and they may want to filibuster one day.

There is one way to avert a showdown. The White House should meet with Senate leaders of both parties and come up with a list of nominees who will not be filibustered. This means that Mr. Bush - like Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush before him - would agree to submit nominees from the broad mainstream of legal thought, with a commitment to judging cases, not promoting a political agenda.

The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

[Wiglaf]

I love the suggestion in particular that the vote was long overdue for 18 years. It's too perfect

[Hauldren Collider]

The New York Times is almost as intellectually honest as Ben Kenobi.