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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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I wonder when this magical time was where voting for the president had great choices. What many young voters fail to understand is that it’s not all about the president. Get enough Democrats into Congress, and they will be able to vote for progressive legislation, and if you send that to your far-from-ideal president’s desk, they’ll sign it.
It's certainly a much easier task than having an awesome progressive president who begs a near 50-50 Congress to pass good bills, and it just doesn’t happen.
We had 60 and they killed the public option. How many do we need?
People need to study how the Moral Majority took control of the GOP. Nixon was a dead duck after he lost his California Senate race, but he knew that an ex-Vice President was a big deal in small places. He campaigned tirelessly for years, getting lots of Reps, Governors, and Mayors elected. In 1968 he breezed in because he had the Party base on his side.
The MMs did the same. They would show up at every local GOP meeting with enoughvotes to get their agenda enacted. One day the Party big shots looked around and realized that all the dog catchers, county clerks, and sheriffs in their state were MMs.
What is an MM?
Abbreviation for the Moral Majority that they mentioned in the first paragraph.
Oh gotcha thanks.
Thanks for explaining
Ok, so we need to force the system to change outside of its normal paths of power to have choices. No one thinks this time existed, everyone understands the current situation is bad.
repeated comment
Who woulda thunk that grassroots campaign works? Even for the side that you don't like?
There is no exact number. The more there are, the bolder they can be.
Please tell me you’re not talking about the two month window in 2010 where they had a filibuster-proof majority, and passed a major healthcare reform bill, but it was kneecapped because it relied on Joe Lieberman to pass. Because that’s a case where a couple more Democrats would have made a huge difference in what we would have gotten, and also turned 2 months and some change into two years. That’s my point that there’s no exact number.
Having enough is a spectrum: the more there are, the bolder the legislation and the more likely it is to pass. So however many you get, you always fall short of doing even better with more.
Single payer healthcare had been discussed in the early stages — and it was clear they wouldn’t have 60 votes for it, so it was a non-starter. Because there were exactly 60 D/Is, there was no wiggle room. And the GOP held up the 60th Senator in the courts as long as they could because they had no wiggle room. And then Ted Kennedy had to vote for the ACA on his virtual deathbed, and after that their 60 votes were gone, so they couldn’t spend more time on healthcare or move on to other tough issues. Lieberman forced them to remove the public option from the bill.
But you are just overlooking that they did pass a major, consequential healthcare reform bill that solved some very important problems, which couldn’t be accomplished for decades before then, even though people tried.
And this all touches on my original point: a couple more Senators would have changed things significantly at that time, but a more progressive president would not have.
That is just so frigging reductive. It was a Democratic bill, worked on and championed by Democrats. Just because it had some aspects in common with things the GOP also wanted to do way back when they actually wanted to improve some things, and just because the publicly conducted hearings allowed input from anyone in Congress, that doesn’t mean it was a “Republican bill”, nor does it change the fact that it made meaningful improvements to some aspects of healthcare that were really screwed up. I already explained before about how they actively tried to do more. The public option was dropped a few months before passing the ACA because they couldn’t get 60 votes for it.
As to the rest — Republicans accomplish big things? What the fuck have they accomplished? Many of their goals are to prevent the government from functioning, which is much easier to do, because you can filibuster or if you have control of congress you don’t have to even bring a bill to a vote. When it comes to actually producing anything… what have they done?
The only thing the GOP did of substance is fucking up the SCOTUS, which was a combo of luck and a unilateral move on the part of Mitch McConnell. Scalia died close enough to the end of a term to run out the clock by Mitch, and RBG died while the GOP controlled the Senate and presidency.
They couldn’t even replace or shut down the ACA when finally given the opportunity after talking about it for years and years, with control of both houses and the presidency. The House currently has barely been able to even choose a leader. Almost everything they do is performative. Otherwise, they just stand in the way of creating, improving, and funding things. Thats easier to do, but unfortunately that’s not an option for the Democrats who actually want to make things.