The vote was 60-39.
Say what you will, but it’s been clear from the start that what Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel have been interested in is Barack Obama signing a bill called “Healthcare Reform,” whether it helped ordinary people or not, and the Senate version fits the description to a “T”.
Obama has already made it clear that he wants the Senate bill to be the one out of committee, as shown by his full throated support of the tax on “Cadillac” insurance plan tax.
It means that, in addition to everything else, the bill is anti-union too, because protecting health care for their workers has been the Unions rear guard action for the past 28 years, ever since Reagan made union-busting cool with PATCO.
So, we will now allow insurance companies to levy a tax on ordinary Americans, and Rahmbama just loves that.
I had rather hoped that a few of the Senate Democrats, and those who caucus with them (I’m talking to you Bernie Sanders) would have had the guts to vote for cloture but against the bill, but no such luck.
At the rate things are going, we will get someone even more batsh%$ insane than George W. Bush in 2012, because there is no Republican on the national scene who is saner than he is right now.
I am not sure about your point regarding Bernie Sanders – do you think he should have opposed the bill? Sure, Obama could have easily gotten us a better system, but given that this is the proposal he put on the table, and since there is no reason to think that a better proposal would be available any time soon, shouldn't Sanders have voted for it?
Obamacare is probably not the great victory for progressives that Obama and Krugman make it out to be, but it may very well be better than the status quo, and given that Obama's top priority is comforting the comfortable, there is no reason to think rejecting the bill would have led to a better outcome.
Here's one former Dem who will NEVER vote for a member of "his" party for national office again, ever. Henceforth, in those charades we call "national elections", I'm either voting Green or boycotting the damn things altogether. Commerce rules the Land of the Free, and government is its bitch. Voting merely legitimizes the oligarchy.
I think that a couple of Dems should have voted for cloture, but against the bill, as a signal that they were displeased, and that their votes were not to be taken for granted.
Sanders, who has been the most shabbily treated, and who, as an independent, will never be a senior member of the leadership, as well as being the most liberal in the senate, should have been among the 3-8 who voted against the bill to show that they are not to be taken for granted.
By voting yes, they wrote welcome on their chests, which makes people (Rahmbama) want to wipe their feet on them.
If you do that, you are pulling a 1/2 a lever for the Republicans.
"Signalling" is simply grandstanding. They either vote for it or against it when it matters.
That is true. But it is also true that if you vote for Democrats simply because they are better than Republicans you are giving them a free hand to become as nearly bad as Republicans as they want to be.
See here: Elections as the Ultimatum Game.
Absolutely. But the idea that the government can never make things better plays into the reactionary elements of our body politics.
The solution is not to give to the DCCC or the DSCC or the DNC, who give huge chunks of money to folks like the formerly Democratic Griffith, but instead to use other means (Act Blue comes to mind) to fund people who are not corporate-crats in both the primaries and the general election.
In some cases this may mean supporting Greens, or even Republicans in the general, see Stupak, Bart.