Democratic Primaries
Related: About this forumIn 2008 and 2009 we didn't have the votes to pass a public option or Medicare for All
There was Blanche Lincoln, Lieberman, Nelson in Florida, Nelson in Nebraska, Evan Bayh in Indiana, and I believe Mark Pryor.
Contrary to what some like to project, we didn't have the votes, and there was NOT ONE republican who was willing to vote for any healthcare package with the Democrats, let alone one with a public option or Medicare for all
Here are the facts:
"Here is how much control we had in 2008-2009:
"Obama had control of the House from 2009-2011, but guess what, legislation does NOT become law without the Senate
The Senate operates with the 60-vote-requirement filibuster rule. Total control of the Senate requires 60 votes.
In January 2009, Democrats had 57 seats, with Sanders and Liberman caucusing with the Democrats for 59 votes.
That 59 included both Kennedy and Franken. Franken was not officially seated until July 2009, and Kennedy had a seizure in January 2009, and never returned to the Senate to vote, so the actual number was 55 plus two independents which makes 57.
It was during that time that President Obama was able to pass a stimulus package, but only because 3 republicans, Collins, Snowe, and Specter voted to break a filibuster guaranteeing its passage
In April 2009, Specter became a Democrat, Kennedy was still at home too ill, and Franken was still not seated in April. In May 2009, Byrd got sick, and didn't return to the Senate until July 2, 2009, and Democrats still had only 59 votes Kennedy's seat was temporarily filled by Kirk, but not until Sept, 2009
It was then that Democrats had at least potentially 60 votes in the Senate, and it lasted all of 4 months, from Sept 24, 2009 through Feb. 4, 2010, at which point Scott Brown, a republican was sworn in to replace Kennedy
The only thing the Democrats had control of for two years was the House, and for only 4 months did we have total control of congress, and it was during that small time frame that the ACA was passed"
vhttps://www.ohio.com/article/20120909/NEWS/309099447
Within that four month time frame could President Obama have included a public option in the ACA, or Medicare for ALL?
Not likely. People seem to conveniently forget that there were blue dog Democrats
who made it very clear they would not vote for a public option or Medicare for All. They were Blanche Lincoln, Lieberman, Nelson in Florida, Nelson in Nebraska, and I believe Mark Pryor. Contrary to what some like to project, we didn't have the votes, and there was NOT ONE republican who was willing to vote for any healthcare package with the Democrats, let alone one with a public option or Medicare for all
For those who think trashing the ACA, which was landmark legislation on healthcare, is good "political strategy", should perhaps put things in perspective, and instead tell us what you would do.
In the coming weeks or months we will see what happens.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Cha
(298,139 posts)Clarity on this part of our History of the Obama Admin, still_one. Very Important Reality Based information!
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
DownriverDem
(6,240 posts)Right now folks on Medicare have paid for Part A through their payroll deductions. They pay for Part B through Social Security deductions or a monthly invoice. Then you have to buy a supplemental policy to cover what Part A and Part B don't cover. So how is Medicare for All going to work?
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
ChiTownDenny
(747 posts)First, I applaud the OP for outlining the challenges of, and success in, getting the ACA passed into law. It's a bold attempt at universal health care. But, basically, it's great if you have no money and had no insurance. If you're middle class, it's very expensive! Much more so than typical employer sponsored insurance. So, what are the costs with Medicare for All? Does it bend the cost curve for us?
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
chimpymustgo
(12,774 posts)nt
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
riversedge
(70,482 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
treestar
(82,383 posts)In a few seconds there will be a post about how President Obama only had to use the bully pulpit and twist arms. It is all so easy.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
highplainsdem
(49,139 posts)and getting that wish list through Congress are two very different things.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
bigbrother05
(5,995 posts)Think Breaux of LA was in that group as well.
The Republicans and blue dogs got concessions, but the GOP reneged on their pledge to back the bill.
Only Collins is left in the Senate, but nothing she says can be trusted.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Princetonian
(1,501 posts)Medicare For All is a good idea but not politically possible. Candidates who support it like Harris. Bernie and Warren should be out campaigning for Democrats to take over the Senate.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
rampartc
(5,458 posts)whenever possible, house candidates as well.
gov john bel Edwards needs some help in October, only 2 months, as well. a visit from the former vice president or a popular senator might help.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Princetonian
(1,501 posts)That was before she decided to imply he was a racist for "working with segregationists" as she did last night.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
LiberalFighter
(51,403 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
ChiTownDenny
(747 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
UniteFightBack
(8,231 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
brer cat
(24,673 posts)I'm afraid that some people think wishing makes laws.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
rzemanfl
(29,589 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
sheshe2
(84,101 posts)Thank you for the reminder. Facts matter.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
nycbos
(6,044 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Progressive dog
(6,934 posts)difficult it was to get the ACA and how impossible it was to get more. Now, the repeal and whatever swarm has control of the Senate and Presidency.
The ACA is under attack and it seems to me that Democrats should not be trying to help Republicans destroy it. There will be no Medicare for All to replace it in any near term realistic future. In fact, people with preexisting conditions, those on medicaid expansion, and those who only can afford insurance through ACA are not able to wait years or decades to get health coverage returned if ACA is repealed or overturned in the courts.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
watoos
(7,142 posts)Google Howard Deans reccolection of what went down. He was DNC chairman and was pissed.
Dems caved to Joe Lieberman, he insisted on removing the public option. With Liebermans support we get the ACA with the public option
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
TwilightZone
(25,525 posts)Ben Nelson would have never approved a public option in the bill. He was my senator at the time and quite adamant in his opposition. He barely voted for the ACA as it stood.
Blanche Lincoln almost assuredly wouldn't have voted for it, either.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
kcr
(15,331 posts)Joe Lieberman insisted on removing the public option. Yes. That's exactly what happened.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
The Wizard
(12,556 posts)skunked the public option in committee. It's why the Democrats lost the House in 2010. The base wanted the public option as the fall back position to single payer. What we got was a convoluted cut and paste version of insurance reform. Give the base a reason to vote or too many will stay home on election day.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Insurance lobby got uts money's worth on him.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
mwooldri
(10,305 posts)... one of the first orders of business in the Senate is to change the rules so that the necessary legislation be passed with a simple majority. We can thank Moscow Mitch for this, since he pulled the nuclear option on judges.... And other things too...
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
cab67
(3,012 posts)The other side can pull the same shut on us if/when they regain control of both houses.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
MiniMe
(21,727 posts)the fuckers wouldn't vote fpor them
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
elocs
(22,657 posts)No candidate who supports Medicare for All will give an honest and realistic explanation for how it would ever become law given how difficult ObamaCare was. What is the point of giving people who need healthcare right now the hope that Medicare for All is anywhere on the horizon?
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Bradical79
(4,490 posts)Republicans have shown they will do so to wreck this country, while also use it to block Democrats when we have respected the rule. It seems the rule means a lot less since McConnell used it to rob Obama of a Supreme Court pick.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)If you have 50+ votes in the Senate you control the Senate.
And as has been demonstrated, it only takes 50+1 votes to change the rules of the senate.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
tblue37
(65,556 posts)prefer not to.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)that watered down the ACA in negotiations they dragged out for months. This was in addition to Republican opposition, but they didn't succeed in removing coverage for preexisting conditions or no annual or lifetime limits on coverages.
Btw, I just looked up to confirm, and of the 45 house Democrats who voted against the final version of the ACA in 2009, only 3 are still in office -- Collin Peterson, who also voted with the Republicans to repeal in January 2016 (noting this was while Sanders was promising to repeal from the left), Stephen Lynch and Dan Lipinski.
Voting against Obamacare turned out NOT to be quite the voter pleaser the blue dogs believed it would.
RW propaganda, blockage of attempts to improve and expand coverages, and severe damage to the ACA markets and funding mechanism did help give big lift to Sanders' promise to repeal among some on the left. Nevertheless, Sanders also isn't finding running against the Obama administration's great legacy a winner so far.
Polls show that, in spite of unrelenting warfare against Obamacare from both sides for years, 80% of Democrats support what has proven so far to be a remarkably indomitable program. And when we give our legislators the power to add the public option and other expansions, that will happen.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
StevieM
(10,500 posts)Do you remember how many Democrats voted with the GOP on that one?
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)to vote with the Repubs that time. I don't know for sure about all the other years and dozens of repeal attempts, but it would have been rare.
Sanders may have wished others did because Republicans helped by blue collars to repeal the ACA would both get rid of it for him and create an actual need for the alternative he was running on, but he himself never voted with the Republicans.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)these "plans" the candidates are pushing.
Getting legislation passed under the best of circumstances means negotiations, compromise and deals that often ends up with nothing like the original plan.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Jakes Progress
(11,125 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
IronLionZion
(45,680 posts)Compromise turned out to be a bad choice for many. It would have been sweet if Dems of all types united for a good liberal public option knowing the red state moderates would lose regardless.
I doubt we'll get that many Dems in the senate any time soon. Moscow Mitch has been blocking everything the Dem house passes lately.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
questionseverything
(9,667 posts)we lost the public option for no good reason at all
<<just shakes head>
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
pnwmom
(109,028 posts)was willing to sign a bill as long as it did NOT include a public option. So the plan was for that Senate approved bill to go to the Reconciliation committee along with the House bill, which would include a public option -- and for them to agree in committee on a compromise bill with the public option.
However, when Kennedy got replaced by a Republican, that was the end of that possibility. All they could do was take the Senate bill, exactly as it had been passed in the Senate, and send it to the House for a straight up and down vote. If they made any changes they'd lose Lieberman's vote. So that was the end of the public option.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
betsuni
(25,845 posts)"Democrats actually had the sixty votes we would need to move forward on health care. The bad news was that we would need every single one of those sixty votes. Which meant every single one of us had a veto. Good luck, Harry Reid! ... A handful of moderate-to-conservative Democrats were opposed to the public option, which would have increased competition in the insurance market. Gone. Someone floated the idea of lowering the age for Medicare to fifty-five. Hmmm. Not a bad idea. ... But then Joe Lieberman announced on Face the Nation that he was against it. Gone. Finally, on Christmas Eve, we passed the bill through the Senate. Phew.
Then Scott Brown was elected. "On top of that, our math problem had just gotten a lot worse, because once Brown took office in early February, that would be the end of our sixty-vote, filibuster-proof supermajority. 'Wait,' you're thinking, 'I thought you had already passed the bill.' We had. And so had the House. But there were some differences between the two bills. Ordinarily, it wouldn't be a big deal. We'd convene a conference committee, hash out the differences, and then both chambers would vote to pass the unified bill that came out of the conference. But Republicans were still hell-bent on stopping us from passing health care reform, and now that they once again had forty-one votes in the Senate, they could stop us from voting on the unified bill. .... There was only one solution: The House would have to pass the exact same bill we had just passed. Guess who didn't like that idea? House Democrats. Liberals wanted provisions from the House's more progressive bill, and Democrats from more conservative districts were now spooked by Brown's victory in Massachusetts.
"Finally, after a few hair-raising weeks of negotiations and arm-twisting, the House passed the Senate bill as it was by a 219-212 margin. We would later be able to make some minor adjustments through a complicated parliamentary procedure called 'reconciliation,' which requires only fifty-one votes."
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
GulfCoast66
(11,949 posts)With the president, the house and 60 senate members we barely passed the ACA!
And now we have candidates wanting to scrap it and try for a crazy Medicare for all idea!!
When we control nothing but the house?!?
Its delusional to me. Were lucky we got the ACA.
And there is never an answer when asked how are we going to pass Medicare for all. Normally no response. Occasionally an insult for being a moderate!
Or the also common: everyone wants it. It will pass!
It like impeachment. Its not Pelosi...the votes arent there!
Reality sucks at times. It sucks worse if you dont accept it and deal with it.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
DallasNE
(7,404 posts)In order to get the 60 votes Obama had to agree to the "cornhusker kickback" in order to get Ben Nelson's vote. Because Brown won Kennedy's seat the bill had to be sent back to the House where they had to vote the Senate version to avoid going to conference where it would have to go back for a vote in each chamber. Somehow the cornhusker kickback got removed in the process and the bill was signed into law.
What remains of the ACA is a shell of the original bill after SCOTUS and Trump got done with it. In Nebraska the ACA only has one plan available and it has a $20,000 deductible. In the 2018 election Nebraska voters passed a Medicaid expansion amendment but the Nebraska Unicameral failed to pass enabling legislation, like Utah. In 2020 will the voters make Republicans pay a price for this snub? Not a chance.
As your post demonstrates the criticism of Obama on his signature legislative bill (along with the stimulus package) is not grounded on fact. Some of the criticism on immigration, however, is fair. Yes, he extended protection to Dreamers and he got the Senate to pass a comprehensive immigration bill but Speaker Paul Ryan would not bring it up for a vote in the House, killing it but he also had an aggressive deportation policy. Even here his record is light years ahead of what Trump has done but that doesn't mean there weren't issues with his execution on immigration.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Gothmog
(146,029 posts)The fact that Booke, Castro and Harris think that attacking President Obama is a good move surprises me
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
still_one
(92,552 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Gothmog
(146,029 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Agree
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Gothmog
(146,029 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
still_one
(92,552 posts)the ACA
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
MasonDreams
(756 posts)Obama was masterful, brilliant even. When he put those repukes on TV so they could not escape their own words and you could see their faces, contorted by we what you could see they were thinking. OMG it was beautiful. The ACA was a big improvement.
But the greed monsters are out of their minds. Private Insurance has got to go. It is just a scam. A scam that enables the hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.
Result? Can't go to the doc, ain't got no $ if it gets worse I'll just go emergency and not pay the hospital. What would you do? Can't squeeze blood out of a turnip.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
OrwellwasRight
(5,170 posts)He created the votes by pressing people. That is what politics is. Not giving up and saying oh, I guess Joe Lieberman can have his way.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Locrian
(4,522 posts)Why do I see more and more posts about "not having the votes"?
Why is that an excuse? Why do we supposedly elect people to "lead" and then watch them follow the path of least resistance?
It's either
a) they aren't leaders
b) they didn't want the issue to pass (whatever it was) in the first place
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
pnwmom
(109,028 posts)There were also conservative Democrats. The parties are much more skewed to the extremes these days, with far fewer moderates to help form majorities.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
still_one
(92,552 posts)nonsense have no desire to understand the differences or the situation, and only want to use it as an excuse to not so subtly blame President Obama, and the Democrats at the time, even though the facts in the OP made it clear why that wasnt going to happen
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
pnwmom
(109,028 posts)what the situation was at the time. We were very fortunate that the ACA was passed in the very small window of time -- 4 months -- when we had enough votes to overcome the filibuster. And one of those votes was Joe Lieberman's, an independent who opposed the public option.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
OrwellwasRight
(5,170 posts)It's why I don't post much here anymore. It seems like too often I get into a fight with other DUers whose mantra come across as excusing weak results and getting angry at me for demanding better from our elected officials (of both parties).
In any case, if politics is the art of the possible, the key is to make things possible, not throw up your hands because you think trying is futile...
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Locrian
(4,522 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
pnwmom
(109,028 posts)and party leaders routinely put majorities together by working across the aisle.
Then Republican House leader Dennis Hastert came along and decreed that, from then on, they would only pass a bill if they had a "majority of the majority" -- that is, with Republican votes alone.
Sometime later, we lost most of our "DINO's" -- conservative Democrats that progressives liked to disparage as "Democrats in name only."
So the parties are heavily skewed now, and there is little to no working across the aisles. The most "liberal" Republican is Susan Collins, who only votes with Democrats about 36% of the time (even less often on crucial votes).
http://www.progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?house=senate
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
MaryMagdaline
(6,859 posts)Thanks for doing this research. People need to be reminded
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
betsuni
(25,845 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
bigtree
(86,024 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Gothmog
(146,029 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden