Darn. Is the honeymoon over already?
Yes, the honeymoon is over. Not only did T***p not win a majority, the majority who voted against him hate him with the power of a 1,000 suns and a significant portion of his own voters don’t like him or trust him either; they just didn’t like and didn’t trust Hillary more.
Don the Con and his Bait and Switch tactics need to be called out exactly as Sherrod Brown did. Simple and direct.
This health care shit is HARD!
Making matters more complicated is the fact that no one is quite sure what their President-elect is thinking at this point.
Really? Why not visit Twitter and find out? That’s where all the Presidents share their fine policy details.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a person who has attained to the age of thirty years and been nine years a citizen of the United States, being duly re-elected to exercise all legislative powers granted to Congress by the Constitution, believes that “We don’t do big, comprehensive very well here in Washington, D.C.”
That’s reassuring, but at least he’s a good fit for the president-elect-in-waiting who similarly came to realize that “This is really a bigger job than I thought.”
Whenever you see the word “bipartisan” being used that is a clear signal that it will not be done through reconciliation. One of my inside baseball colleagues told me that there is no courage on Capitol Hill to touch Medicare through reconciliation. He was less certain about ObamaCare but he thought the enormity of the budget implications for states and hospitals and the prospect of millions of people losing insurance just in time for midterms would make the Senate hide behind their usual procedural dodges. Medicare is so much more politically popular at this point that I think he is right about that much. I mean, don’t relax, keep hitting because it’s the actual publicity of doing this stuff that forces them to take sides from which they will find it hard to back away from.
This is a great double win for Ds. The first win: Medicare won’t yet be scrapped. The second win: given all the R chatter about how scrapping Medicare would be a good idea down the road, Ds can now run in the midterms on a “They want to take away your Medicare” platform–and stick to it no matter how hard Rs deny it, which won’t be very hard. This is one winner that will reconnect Ds to workingclass Americans everywhere. I would be compiling a dossier of everything anti-Medicare that Rs have said at any point in the last decade and make sure Ds own this issue like Rs own the (basically fictional) guns issue.
“GOP Senators: Medicare Privatization May Be Too Much To Tackle Right Away”
“That’s all right! We can fuck over people in many other ways!”
I did my share: A snarky letter to the local suburban daily.
Yeah, I agree that pinning them down on this is good politics. Which is another reason to keep talking about it. The problem for Rs is that their donors don’t like hearing full throated support of Medicare as is so they always have to come up with some kind of double speak, whether it’s keeping the program unchanged for current beneficiaries but screwing everyone in the future, or “it will be our first priority in the next legislative session,” even if they don’t mean it.
Well they’re gonna have to do something. Maybe they’re scared off on the MediCare thing (my humch is no; Ryan has had that squirrely gleam in his eye and pep in his step to privatize it for too long to give up that nut now that Pres. Obama is out of the way…) but they will DEFINITELY have to tackle repealing ObamaCare. They’ve made too many promises for too long with too many excuses and now it’s time to deliver.
GOP says, “We’ve only had 8 years to do our homework. We need more time!”
Greysea says, “Keep kicking that can down the road. It’s actually the best thing you could do for us you worthless sacks of crap.”
The question is whether they can do it through reconciliation. The main senators to watch are Collins of Maine, Heller of Nevada, and Portman of Ohio. Toomey of Pennsylvania and the KY and WV delegation are also likely not to want to use reconciliation. That way they can vote against the ACA without blowing holes through their state budgets.
“Can we please be in the minority again? Saying no is so much easier!”
All this POLICY shit is HARD.
Especially after eight years of peanut gallery inactivity.
Finally understanding what Mitch meant when he said they have to be careful about using the term mandate and acting recklessly. Colin Powell used simple terms saying “if you break it, you own it”. The voters will have second thoughts during the midterm elections after seeing what the GOP has done with total control of the government.
“I think we should leave Medicare for another day”
By all means go for it if the goal is to have a blue haired senior ramming a pitch fork up your posterior. Also, the “solvency” issues are easily addressed without changing the structure of Medicare one single bit.
Governing is hard!
Republican senators are signaling that they shouldn’t be tackling
Medicare privatization anytime soon, at least not as part of repealing
and replacing Obamacare.
…
Messing with Medicare should end a politician’s career. Improving it should enhance their career. By improving I mean expand it to cover everyone. I know, I know… a pipe dream… But I can dream can’t I?