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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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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.