House Republican leaders introduced a bill Thursday to repeal and replace the sweeping healthcare law adopted in late March.
According to Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the measure would repeal the current law and replace it with the alternative the minority party offered to the original healthcare legislation last November.
“As unpopular as this healthcare bill is today, it’s at the height of its popularity,” Blunt said. “The more the American people know about it, the more concerns they are going to have, and the more they are going to look at alternatives.”
I find it simply amazing that anyone would vote for these morons.
Remember November
Blunt, man sounds like a chronic( asshole)
flukebucket
It is a great mystery.
I got behind a car this morning on my way to work with a bumper sticker that read, “Back Again in 2010”
Why that thought would bring anybody joy I just cannot imagine.
Chat Noir
Seconded. These clowns are the same bunch who ran this country into the ground when they were the majority. To return them to power would be criminal.
Soprano2
Oh, he is (he’s my rep, unfortunately). He’s anti-abortion and anti-gay, so they love him down here regardless of anything else he might say or do. The international headquarters of the Assemblies of God is in his district – remember, we’re the hometown of John Ashcroft. It seems that every corner that doesn’t have a church on it has a liquor store or a bar. LOL That said I don’t think he’s a shoo-in for Kit Bond’s Senate seat – the whole state is a different animal than SW Missouri.
WereBear
Because they get elected in their home district, where the voters are pressed from every direction to disregard what people “not from here” know and think and discuss.
Sort of a “Yes, he’s a moron, but he’s our moron” thinking.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
The DSCC and DNC and everyone else that begins with a D should send pamphlets out to every household telling people what they will be getting from the health care bill, timing it so they find out a month or so before the new features take effect. In part, the one coming up where parents can keep their kids on until they turn 27 I think will be welcome.
Michael
Let me guess – tax cuts combined with a preemptive federalization provision that allows all policies to be sited in the state with the weakest consumer protection provisions and most toady-like judiciaries.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Why would you find it amazing? Who else would this person vote for?
jibeaux
It seems to be a repeal of the unpopular stuff, while keeping the popular stuff like an end to rescission and pre-existing conditions.
Republicans: promising you ponies and giving you shit since, like, everyday.
Zifnab
Can we get any poll numbers on the Republican alternative plan? Or, I don’t know, a basic sweeping repeal? I’d love to see the public consensus on “9 more months of health care debate”. Hey everybody! Want to go through another round of batshit crazy town halls and months long media shitstorms? No? Well, you’re all a bunch of unAmericans, then!
mellowjohn
i like what rep. alan grayson said on stephanie miller yesterday: voting the republicans back in would be like hiring al-qaeda pilots fly airliners. they’re not interested in landing the plane; they want to crash it.
flukebucket
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
That was wonderful. Kind of like watching the birth of a firebagger.
mellowjohn
btw, belafon, HHS is doing just that. and steve benen has a piece up about how mitch mcchinless is bitcing about “government-paid propaganda.”
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@flukebucket:
At first I thought that video was a trailer for Endora Origins: Bonnie Grape.
Obviously Lee DeWyze isn’t her knight in shimmering armor.
Citizen_X
@flukebucket:
Because it pisses off liberals.
That, by itself, is enough to justify any action or any policy, no matter how pointless, destructive or retarded.
bcinaz
Has been my default position all year.
Tell me again why the Republican Party will take over the House in November?
Everybody’s mad. Are we mad enough to drive the car off a cliff and slit our wrists while plummeting to our doom?
Bullsmith
Notice they’re introducing the bill now, when there is absolutely no chance it will pass. If and when the repubs finally get back in you can rest assured that other than more subsidies for the ultra-rich, they will take no action whatsoever on any campaign issues. Otherwise how could they campaign on them?
All hot air, all the time.
Mike Kay
… why even the liberal Firedoglake supports repeal…
See, the repeal is bipartisan.
Anne Laurie
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: Don’t watch the AI myself (not a value judgement, just don’t get the Fox channel), but as I understand it, the woman in that clip was actually rooting for the less obnoxious candidate.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Blunt is running for Bond’s senate seat, as mentioned earlier. His opposition is Robin Carnahan. She accepts donations.
ET
Everyone else doesn’t know there was a law passed, doesn’t care that there was a law passed, is OK with the law that was passed, which a better law had passed, likes the law that passed. Most have just gone on with their life.
The law is only really unpopular with the squeaky wheel Tea Baggers. They are the ones still obsessing over this like it was an indication of the End Times or the coming evil of (a long dead) Communism.
Just because his self-selecting constituency and myopic, cheery-picked evidence supports his opinion doesn’t make it true.
JCT
“Alternatives”? Right, lets just trot out those alternatives, remember– they only take 1 sheet of paper. That you guys somehow misplaced during the 8 years you were running things.
Really, if these guys stood up and started off with “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves” they would be closer to reality.
Completely bereft of morals and ideas– the modern Republican Party.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Anne Laurie:
It doesn’t matter who she was rooting for or why.
flukebucket
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Well. I was a Crystal Bowersox fan myself but godamighty.
You gotta put it down and move on.
dj spellchecka
hate to break it to blunt, but everytime somebody does a poll asking people about SPECIFIC parts of the health care act, the approval numbers go UP…if we actually had a liberal media in this country, perhaps people might already know what’s in this bill
mclaren
And herein lies the problem.
Voters typically don’t vote for the party out of power, they vote against the incumbents to teach them a lesson. Failing to understand this leads to a general incomprehension of how politics works in the United States of Amnesia.
Barack Obama and the Democrats got elected in 2008 to enact sweeping meaningful reform. They blew that mandate and refused to meaningfully reform the system.
Their health care “reform” was non-reform that dumped millions of uninsured (and uninsurable) chronically ill people with pre-existing conditions on state medicaid programs when the states are already too broke to pay for the existing medicaid and are scaling back their medicaid payments as fast as they possibly can. There are no cost controls in the HCR bill, so the mandates force ordinary middle class voters to pay private insurance companies for health care premiums that are guaranteed to zoom higher in price without limit, far faster than the rate of inflation.
The Democrats’ financial “reform” bill going through congress right now is non-reform which does not break up the too-big-to-fail banks and does not enact fundamental and obviously necessary reforms like reinstating usury caps on interest rates. Remember those? Prior to 1982, we had a crime called “usury” in America. It meant charging too much interest. Today, a financial institution can charge any interest it wants…20%, 35%, 70%, 300%. GE makes 70% of its corporate profit today off its division euphemistically called “GE Capital,” which actually means predatory loan storefronts that charge 300% interest on title loans to poor people.
The Democrats have refused to scale back U.S. military spending which today exceeds 1.3 trillion dollars per year, broadly defined to include the VA and military pensions plus the CIA and NSA and NRO (satellite surveillance) plus Pentagon black project (50 billion dollars a year) and classified programs like the DOE’s energy weapons projects (20 billion a year) and the Air Force space weapons program (22 billion per year).
The Democrats have refused to end the pointless third-world wars that we’re losing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Democrats have refused to break up the giant monopolies like Comcast and Citi Corp and Disney and Microsoft and Fox Newscorp that are strangling the American economy.
The Democrats have refused to take federal action to rein in abusive police and punish with federal civil rights prosecutions police abuses like tasering to death grandmothers, 10-year-old children, etc.
The Democrats have refused to end the war on drugs, instead doubling down with more money for enforcement.
The Democrats have refused to enact meaningful prison reform, with the result that America has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prison population, and the cost of housing all those prisoners is now bankrupting states across the country even as the “lock ’em up” mania continues to spiral out of control.
The Democrats have refused to scale back the unconstitutional violations and atrocities of the previous 8 years, and have instead invented new and even more heinous abuses in addition to torture and kidnapping without charges and trial (called “preventive detention” by Obama) — the Democrats now claim the unconstitutional and flagrantly illegal power to assassinate American citizens without charges and without a trial.
The voters who see this wholesale betrayal by the Democrats react with a “vote the bums out” mentality. They vote against incumbents across the board to punish them.
Unfortunately, this means that they’re voting in the insane people, the Republicans. American voters don’t think of it that way. They think of it in terms of punishing the incumbents for failing to live up to their promises.
That’s why we can expect a Republican landslide this fall in the House and possibly a big enough shift even in the senate to regain Republican control of both houses. The Democrats had a chance to come through with meaningful systemic reform, and they blew it. They betrayed the voters, and now the voters will punish them for it. The fact that the voters are also in effect shooting themselves in the head seems to be a side issue of secondary importance to most voters. This is actually understandable. A lot of voters apparently feel “If we’re not going to get meaningful reform, then fuck it, we might as well vote for the insane stupid party and collapse America as quickly as possible, because the status quo is unsustainable anyway.”
Tim P.
@mclaren: I sympathize with some of your points, but this explanation is really not tethered to reality. Unfortunately, the American electorate is not ultra-liberal; it’s reactionary and often frustratingly pigheaded. The Democrats are losing because the economy is in rough shape and people are upset about it. If the economy was better, the Democrats would be fine. If the economy keeps improving between now and November, so will the Democrats’ poll numbers.
As for the idea that there are vast swathes of voters who are so liberal that they’re planning to vote Republican in order to hasten the twilight of the empire, again, that only makes sense if you project your own views onto everyone else. Look at the polls some time. The problem isn’t Democrats turning against Democrats; it’s that midterm elections favor Republicans by default and this year they’re especially rabid.
mclaren
It’s entirely possible that I’m 100% wrong, and if there’s some evidence to support that view, then by all means, I’m glad to change my opinion.
However, when you claim Unfortunately, the American electorate is not ultra-liberal; it’s reactionary and often frustratingly pigheaded, where’s the evidence to support that claim?
If you look at polls, Americans concur at well above 55% that both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan are going badly. If you ask whether the U.S. should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, a majority of the American people answer “yes.”
This happens to be true across the board in opinion polls.
If you ask Americans whether we should have a single-payer health care system, a majority of Americans answer “yes.” If you ask whether the president should be able to assassinate U.S. citizens without a trial and without charges, a majority say “no.” If you ask whether we should end the war on drugs, a supermajority of Americans give a strong “yes” answer to that one.
These are not even controversial positions anymore. Joe Biden, the vice president of the united states, recently announced a commission to reform our broken prison system. These positions aren’t “ultra-liberal,” they’re not even controversial except to that freakish 27% minority of the tea partiers and far right fringe. By and large, the vast majority of American agree on these issues.
The problem is that both congress and the White House are not acting in accord with the clearly expressed wishes of a majority of the American people. And it’s not just that the White house + congress are doing the opposite of what the American people want on one issue — that sometime happens. It’s across the board. On issue after issue, the Obama White House + Democrat-controlled congress are lined up on the exact opposite side of the issues as the American people.
The political dynamic here is easy to explain. Obama + the democrats in congress have looked at the insane Republican party and concluded that the Republicans are degenerating into such complete idiocy that no reasonable voters would vote for them, so Obama + the congressional democrats feel free to cater to corporate and military-industrial interests and ignore the wishes of the voters.
Obama + the congressional democrats think they’re sitting in the sweet spot with the best of all possible worlds — they’re going to have to get re-elected because voters couldn’t possibly elect the crazy Republicans, and at the same time Obama + the congressional democrats will slurp up all that sweet corporate cash by french-kissing the corporate and miltiary-industrial bungholes.
But in the real world, voters can get pissed off enough to burn down the house just in order to incinerate pols who’ve broken their promises. Obama and the congressional seem to have forgotten this.
If you can show me credible polls (no Red State online polls, thanks, got to be a real reputable polling organization) that demonstrate a majority of the American people support shutting down financial reform, I’ll change my mind. If you can show me credible polls that show less than 50% support for ending the Iraq and Afghan wars, I’ll change my mind. Show me the polls that demonstrate that a majority of Americans want to spend more money of the Pentagon. Show me the polls where more than 50% of Americans advocate assassinating U.S. citizens without charges and without a trial. Show the polls where more than 50% of American support expanding the war on drugs, as Obama is doing.
You can’t, because the polls show exactly the opposite.
What’s freakish here is to describe any of these positions as “ultra-liberal.” These are positions that Barry Goldwater was taking in 1964. These are positions staked out by Eisenhower in the 1950s. To call any of these position “ultra-liberal” is so hallucinogenic, it’s like describing due process and jury trials as “a communist plot” and income taxes as “a sinister subversion of the American way of life.”
crshedd
why don’t democrats just filibuster everything republicans introduce. hell with them.