Field Marshal Stupak sounds worried that his men won’t hold the line. Call and find out!
Solomon Ortiz (D-TX) (202) 225-7742
Jerry Costello (D-IL) (202) 225-5661
James Oberstar (D-MN) (202) 225-6211
Steve Driehaus (D-OH) (202) 225-2216
Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) (202) 225-4146
Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) (202) 225-6511
Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-PA) (202) 225-5406
Joe Donnelly (D-IN) (202) 225-3915
Brad Ellsworth (D-IN) (202) 225-4636
Dan Lipinski (D-IL) (202) 225-5701
Charlie Wilson (D-OH) (202) 225-5705
Other Blue Dogs are also ripe targets for phone pressure, particularly Jason Altmire (D-PA). (202) 225-2565
Real health care reform is achingly close.
***Update***
Adam Smith (WA-9) office says he’s hasn’t made up his mind, but they did sound happy to hear from someone who wants to PTDB.
(253) 593-6600
(202) 225-8901Chamber of Commerce is running anti-HCR ads against him.
Also, please call your own Reps before calling those outside your district. Staffers will pay much more attention to a caller with at least a local zip code.
Zuzu's Petals
Do you know how many of these are facing primary opponents?
I’d like to be able to mention that when I call.
gbear
Hey, just yesterday All Things Considered told me that Bart had at least twelve allies to vote against federal funding for abortions!
How many ways can NPR be wrong? It doesn’t do any good to gripe about it because they don’t even try to get it right anymore.
Tenzil Kem
Kanjorski is facing a primary from Corey O’Brien, a county commissioner in his district. So Kanjorski may be particularly susceptible to phone calls.
gbear
I called my rep, Betty McCollum, yesterday and requested quite adamantly that she go kick Oberstar’s butt. Oberstar won’t listen to me but maybe he’ll listen to her.
geg6
Altmire’s line won’t pick up as they say they are getting a high volume of calls. And the voice mailbox is full.
And after trying the OFA number which sends you directly to the House switchboard, it rang about 10 times and then hung up on me.
Somebody is jamming the lines. Hope it’s all the OFA people.
Max
On a related note.. Flip Flop Congress Critters. Former yes’, who might flip to no.
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/the-flip-floppers-which-reps-are-leaning-no-on-health-care.php?r…
Call ’em up!
ETA – Mass BJ’ers, Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA) is citing “using complicated and dangerous process” of reconciliation as his reason for possibly voting no. Light his switchboard up. That is total chicken shit.
MikeJ
Adam Smith (WA-9) office says he’s hasn’t made up his mind, but they did sound happy to hear from someone who wants to PTDB.
(253) 593-6600
(202) 225-8901
Chamber of Commerce is running anti-HCR ads against him.
kindness
Alright, I’ve donated to Stupack’s primary opponent. Let’s give the man what he needs….the bum’s rush.
Napoleon
IMO Stupak has been lying since day one about the number of people who would vote with him. Notice in the link the POS in a round about way threatens the Demcratic Party that if they don’t come around to voting like the wingers on abortion some Dems will be leaving.
Zuzu's Petals
@MikeJ:
I told his staffer that there are a LOT of people following this closely. That there is a LOT of support for this, and for Dems who will step up and do the right thing. So he should feel brave, even if there are ads being run against him.
He seemed appreciative of the call.
qwerty42
It is still a hard call, but I have had the feeling that the logjam is breaking up. This is only one sign. I think Stupak’s folks see this as passing no matter and they are being written out. Will McCain be on the Sunday news shows for his opinion? Maybe Liz Cheney? maybe both?
jharp
I did my job and phoned Ellsworth’s office.
He’s undecided on the bill and supports the Stupak amendment. Kind of sad that the person I spoke with didn’t even understand Stupak’s amendment.
Wildcat12
This may be a bit OT, but primarying Stupak won’t do much. Any one of these dolts would step up and be the next one. The best course of action it to do just this, call them and bring some pressure on them.
gypsy howell
BTW, the other douchebag half of the Stupak-Pitts amendment, the loathesome despicable douchebag Joe “He’s The” Pitts (my douchebag representative, I’m ashamed to say. Did I mention he’s a douchebag?) has a good Democratic challenger, Lois Herr.
She could use some love.
MikeJ
btw, the group running the ads against Smith is:
employersforahealthyeconomy.org/
a front for Chamber of Commerce and Builders groups. They’re probably running the same ad all over. I’d be interested in seeing who they were targeting.
Zuzu's Petals
@jharp:
I just called and pointed out that since the Senate bill also prohibits funding of abortion there is no reason for him not to support it on that question. Again pointing out that a LOT of people are following this closely to the point of being willing to support opponents etc., but that I want to support Ellsworth so I hope he does the right thing.
It’s amazing how much info you can get out before the staffer can say Kthxbye.
jeffreyw
Costello says he is not aligned with Bart Stupid, just that Stupid claims he is. Alas, he is “undecided”. I became a “colorful old codger” at that point, the young man on the phone was happy to say “goodbye, sir”.
Michael D.
Off topic, but…
Dear Mexico, go ahead and fly your military helicopters over Texas and let them whine about it. “Certain” people in Texas, perhaps, need a taste of what it’s like when a foreign military comes into their country uninvited.
Napoleon
@Wildcat12:
I think it will. Even if it doesn’t phase Stupak I bet it does his followers.
les
@qwerty42:
May I assume this-
-is rhetorical?
garage mahal
In comments, over at Ann Winehouse’s blog, I just learned that “The Coffee Party” is just like Nazi Germany.
I think HCR will send these people right over the edge. Borrowing from Cole, I give it a 80-20% chance of us achieving Peak Wingnut when HCR passes.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Just called Harry Teague my congresscritter and was told what I was told yesterday and every day. That Teague won’t decide whether to vote for the Senate Bill until it’s formally introduced in the House. He lives in a wingnut district that covers little Texas, or the SE corner of NM. Though I live in a peoples republic county in the SW corner, we are still outnumbered and the seat will likely return to the GOP this fall. Depends on whether Teague is serious about trying to hold onto the seat, and if so likely would vote no. But I don’t really know much about the dude since he is new.
les
@Max:
Where does he find the smarts and courage to get out of bed in the morning?
KDP
And then there is this sternly worded missive from Harry Reid to Mitch McConnell. All I can say is:
Good for Harry!!!
This sort of communication ought to be getting MSM airtime and the Repubs asked to account for their actions. Well, a girl can dream.
Max
@les: From Halperin…
Meet the Press: Axelrod, Rep. Clyburn, Sen. Durbin, Karl Rove
This Week: Axelrod, Sen. Graham
Face the Nation: Gibbs, Rep. Wasserman Schultz, Sen. Alexander, Karen Ignagni
State of the Union: Rep. Boehner
Fox News Sunday: Reps. Van Hollen, Cantor; Gibbs, Rove
Looks like Mrs. Graham-McCain is pulling Sunday duties this weekend.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
This was never in doubt once the witching hour drew nigh.
qwerty42
@les: May I assume this- … -is rhetorical?
Yes, of course at least one will be on.
mr. whipple
Has anyone from W. Ohio tried Marcy Kaptur? I’m having a hard time believing that in the end, if her vote is needed, she won’t do the right thing.
MikeJ
@garage mahal: Those people can’t stand even the acknowledgment that other people exist. Upon googling “coffee party”, the lame new google algorithm throws a bunch of right wing whining to the top of the results (presumably because it’s “freshest”.)
qwerty42
@Max: No McCain or Liz? It’s almost as if they’re not relevant. Say this isn’t so.
Jeff Fecke
@Napoleon:
Oh noes! Anti-choice Democrats are going to take their ball and go to the GOP? But who in the Democratic Party will be left to tell women what they should do with their uteruses?
robertdsc
@Jeff Fecke:
They leave and then promptly get teabagged. Bye bye, Congressperson.
NR
Wait, I thought that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that the Democratic leadership could do to get their members to vote the way they want. At least, that’s what everyone here said back when the public option was being debated.
kay
@mr. whipple:
I think she will come through. She’s not my rep, or I would call her.
Stupak says he is getting “pounded” by unions, and if he is, she is too.
John Cole
I just got off the phone with Rep. Mollohan, and the lady who answered the phone said he was waiting to hear about the Stupak language. Apparently on top of being corrupt, Mollohan is a pro-lifer and a quiet member of the Stupak brigade.
batgirl
Lipinski is in a safe seat. He won the primary handily and I don’t think the GOP is fielding a candidate against him. He inherited his seat from his daddy.
I have nothing good to say about him. I work, but do not live, in his district. He is a media whore around cultural values issues. Regularly likes to parade around libraries accusing us of pushing porn and wanting to make us filter. Don’t know if he is gettable but will spread the word to those I know who live in his district who want HCR.
Betsy
@Max:
I posted some of this earlier, but here’s a better place for it:
I called my rep Capuano’s local office this morning. I asked what his position on health care was currently, and was put on the phone with a lovely woman with whom I had a very nice chat. She sounded weary but relieved to hear from someone polite and knowledgeable. I explained where I was coming from, said that as a historian of the modern US I thought that the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act was a warning against making the “perfect” the enemy of the “passing.” We talked about where the line was between “not good enough” and “good enough to pass, if not perfect,” and I stressed that this bill is so much better than the status quo, and that it can always be amended in other years, as medicare and civil rights bills were. And that if we didn’t pass it, we wouldn’t get another chance for a generation at least. The lady was very responsive and seemed genuinely interested in what I was saying. I hope it made a difference.
So, this is another reminder that as angry as we are, it REALLY helps to be polite to the staff.
Jenn
@les:
It’s funny, up til when this news about Capuano came up, how many people I was reading (elsewhere, not on B-J) who were going off on the awfulness of Coakley, and how they’d voted for Capuano in the primary, and if Capuano had only gotten in, we’d have health care by now.
Given Capuano’s latest antics, color me skeptical.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@kay: I wouldn’t take Stupak’s word for it any more the wingers claiming falsely the senate bill had to be signed by Obama before reconciliation could happen. The unions are mostly worried about the excise tax and getting it fixed so as to give them time to renegotiate their contracts. Some of them likely went wholly from the gooper misinfo, which was exactly what is was meant to have happen.
Mnemosyne
@Wildcat12:
Since the mere threat of a primary challenge brought Blanche Lincoln back into line and got Arlen Specter to actually vote with the Democrats after switching parties, I have no qualms about threatening to primary Stupak and his merry band of idiots. It doesn’t cost us a dime and the threat itself could very well work.
Chat Noir
I called my rep’s (Gary Peters-MI9) local office yesterday to voice my support again and urged him to do the same. The lady who answered the phone took my name, my husband’s name, and our address, although it was already in their system. Told her we visited Rep. Peters last year when we were in D.C. on vacay and that we got to talk with him personally (he was very pro-HCR and pro-public option).
And dog love my 88 year old mother-in-law who lives in suburban St. Louis. Got an e-mail from her this morning saying she called both of her senators (Bond and McCaskill) and her representative (William Clay) to urge them to support HCR.
mr. whipple
@kay:
That’s good news. I don’t know what to think. She’s very safe in her district, as Catholic as it is, and she was very prominant during the Stupak markup committee meeting spewing RW rhetoric. OTOH, I just don’t know if she has it in her to vote against people getting help.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
I didn’t realize that unions and other “traditional Democratic supporters” now count as part of the Democratic leadership.
Here’s a guess: arm-twisting by the Democratic leadership works a whole hell of a lot better when you have voters and unions backing them up with the same message instead of indulging in poutrage.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Mnemosyne: NR is a puma wanker. I generally ignore his nonsense. Conflation is his game, as it is with most of that ilk.
aimai
I am a longtime Capuano supporter and I think the idea that, in the end, he isn’t going to vote for HCR is weird. He’s not some kind of closet blue dog and he’s definitely not one of Stupak’s little buddies. We certainly would have had HCR if he’d won the Dem primary for the Senate because he’d have been a reliable vote for cloture on all democratic issues. I admit that he has sent all his constituents this letter detailing the problems for MA with the current Senate bill/soon to be house bill but he’s simply not opposed to HCR and if the leadership is telling their loyal dems its “now or never” there’s just no way he’s going to vote against it. Maybe I’ll have to eat my words but I just don’t see it. I think that all these congresspeople like to seem like they keep their options open even when everyone knows its a done deal.
aimai
Redshift
Mark Warner continues to annoy me, though less than before. Actually, now he’s mystifying me more than annoying me. He’ll never hint at a position on anything before the vote, always hides behind “until he sees the final language.”
So today, I got an email from his office either in response either to the rant I sent him yesterday (the one I posted on the GOS) or in response to one of the various emails I’ve sent over the past few months via various groups (no way to tell, since he usually takes weeks to respond to anything.)
Anyway, I get this long email, where he talks about all the great things in the health care bill, and the amendments he was involved in to make it better (bipartisan, of course, because that’s his schtick), and how the upcoming reconciliation bill (not that he ever uses the word “reconciliation”) from the House will make it even better…
But he still never says whether he supports it!
I’m now pretty confident that he won’t cause any trouble for it, which is good, but geez, if he’s going to go to great lengths trying to convince people what a good bill it is, why can’t he just say “assuming everything proceeds as expected, I’m looking forward to this legislation passing” instead of chickening out once again?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Delicious Tears of a Clown
SiubhanDuinne
@qwerty42:
Wow, I certainly hope so, because I really haven’t heard a peep out of either of them for, oh, years now. Besides, I just love that cute fluffy David on Press the Meat, the avuncular old Bob guy on Fellates the Nation, and the entire panel on the No-Longer-the-George-Snuffleupagus-Show.
NR
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: I’m no PUMA. Any more lies you want to throw out there?
Jim Once
@mr. whipple:
Re Marcy Kaptur – I can’t believe she’s even a member of the Stupids. Can someone in her district explain this to me?
John PM
@batgirl: #36
If Lipinski is anything like his old man, his vote for HCR can be “gotten” quite easily, if you know what I mean…wink, wink, nudge, nudge. He needs to be primaried in 2012.
Mnemosyne
Just to be clear, I’m actually very happy with the big unions: they spotted something specific that they were unhappy with, they asked to have a change made (the threshold for the excise tax will be made higher by the reconciliation fixes though the tax will not be eliminated), and now they’re backing reform to the hilt.
gwangung
I don’t think this is very controversial or very deep. And I sure wouldn’t call that hippie punching (well, OK, maybe the us of the term “poutrage.” But still….). I just think it’s very practical political science that’s applicable for any political position, and that any advocate that is disappointed with leadership without attempting to organize the grassroots is like complaining they’re losing when they’re using only one hand.
demkat620
I called Sestak’s office. He is “waiting” to see the final product.
Keep calling.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@NR: So you once said something good about Obama BFD. Otherwise, You talk like puma, you quack like one, and conflate with nitwit abandon. If you are not a puma, then bring rational arguments on a regular basis, I will reconsider.
Ps,. you may not be a PUMA, and I didn’t call you that. I called you a puma, small case and updated to mean making dumb dissonant arguments like this
@NR:
Cacti
I wish I had a blue dog rep that I could pester. I’m in the middle of wingnutville, AZ.
:-(
Mnemosyne
@Cacti:
I’m in the middle of Los Angeles but that doesn’t stop our local wingnuts (of which there are many) from pestering my rep. Teabaggers have been pestering Democrats ever since this process started.
I say pester away.
kay
@mr. whipple:
I don’t know, I just hope so. I don’t want you to think I know for sure.
I keep narrowly missing being her constituent. It’s a long story.
I end up at events where she is occasionally, so I hear her spiel, and she’s like an old-time populist Democrat, except she’s fiercely anti-war.
BetsyD
I called Costello a few days ago and got at least two others to call as well, though another friend I asked to call said that he’s a “hard-core anti-choice d*ck” who doesn’t listen to his constituents so I don’t know if she called or not.
geg6
For those who are confused about the unions and whether they support this bill, they came out the other day vowing to primary anyone who didn’t vote for oit and have just made a huge purchase of tv ad time to battle the Chamber of Commerce anti-HCR ad buys. The unions are going pedal to the metal on this.
les
Well, here’s some nice bashing-by-unions; maybe Dem Rep Mike McMahon of New York is softened up enough to listen to some constituents…
KCinDC
Can someone explain exactly what Stupak is so upset about? After all, Ben Nelson (IIRC) got anti-abortion language inserted into the Senate bill — language that the bill killers on the left are claiming is the greatest setback for women’s rights in a generation. Is there really something that Nelson forgot to put in?
les
@KCinDC:
Stupak is upset about losing his face time on the teevee. He saw a chance to prevent women from getting insurance coverage for abortion with their own money, and to play a pompous dick for the national media at the same time. In his eyes, a win-win. Go figger.
mcc
@geg6: Just to be clear, is the AFL-CIO included in the group of “the unions” you mention?
mcc
Few things I find interesting:
House vote on the Senate bill is expected by Friday or Saturday next week.
Obama is putting off his trip to Asia until this happens. Basically he was supposed to leave after 18th, the White House started pushing a deadline of the 18th, the House was like “we can’t be done by then” and the White House basically said “okay, then we’ll stick around town and wait for you to finish”. Seems like a nice way of making a point.
Dunno who else is getting these emails, but for the last couple days OFA has been sending out a series of “final march for health care reform” emails. Each one has been labeled “Day One”, “Day Two”, etc, the original email basically explained they had a different activity for OFA members to participate in each day of their final push. Today they sent out a “days three through five” email, linking to a page trying to get people to sign up to phonebank for HCR over the weekend Something interesting about this email: Unlike the Day One and Day Two pages they set up, this one now has blank spaces for “Day six” and “Day seven”. In other words they seem to seriously expect this to be passed within the week.