from an outsiders perspective it seems disingenuous in the absolute extreme to suggest that Obama hasn’t repeatedly and consistently capitulated to the whims of the Republicans, to the effect of completely exasperating his political base.
It does kinda seem that the law would normally be passed and things would move on from there and that this tactic is relatively unusual (but not without precedent) in the process of law making.
Without addressing the seemingly bad faith attempts at pointing out some kind of culpable equivalence, why do you feel the Obama administration should take this further and unusual step to capitulate to what, again to an outsider, seem to be extra-ordinary demands?
You have to find compromise on the current bills with the current
congress, and not say “well someone else agreed to this a year ago, so
you’re stuck with it now.”
With extremely few exceptions, every law was agreed to a year ago or more and, yes, we are stuck with them now. Laws don’t sit in limbo forever, they get passed and signed and that’s that. If you don’t want to obey the law then you repeal it. If you can’t repeal it then it remains the law.
If the republicans think that shutting down the government is a good idea then they should say so. They should say that shutting down the government itself is a plus, but that they would be willing to compromise (i.e., agree to fund the government again, like the democrats want) if the democrats would compromise with them.
What if instead they could somehow repeal the criminal law against murder and wouldn’t put it back in place until they extracted some concessions. Should we be mad at them for making murder legal when they know it is a bad thing? Of course we should. They are saying that they have to do this because if they don’t then they won’t get what they want (even if they don’t even know what they want)1.
“I’ll clean the dishes and you wash the floor” is an offer of compromise. “No one gets to eat until you wash the floor” is a spiteful threat. If government shutdown is something that republicans want as a good in itself, then it’s a negotiating point, otherwise is really is just a bizarre extortion attempt.
Yes, that’s the way laws work. Once they are laws, they are laws. The SCOTUS can overturn them, but in the case of this law, the SCOTUS found it Constitutional. So if the legislature doesn’t like a law and wants to overturn it, or some provision, they should follow the legislative process of introducing a new bill updating the law, having a debate and voting on that, passing it through both houses and then have the POTUS sign it. Having the House go rogue and try to undo a law bypassing that process by holding government funding as a hostage is beyond the pale. It’s in compete violation of the checks and balances the Constitution put in place, and it’s not only rational, but critical that the Senate not let that pass. Permitting that wouldn’t be negotiating or cooperating, it would be cowing to extortion.
At this point, I’m not happy with either party. The edict to shutdown the open air monuments actually came from the White House. So you can thank the president for that one. There is plenty of blame for everyone: republicans launching a feudal attempt to kill Obamacare, the democrats who if anyone remembers did not like the Obamacare bill as stated, and the president who shrugs his shoulders and says it up to the people down the street to do something. So the republicans need to get their heads out of a dark smelly place and understand just because they say the sky is falling, people will not believe them. The democrats need to get their act together and fix Obamacare since they didn’t like the original bill but passed it just so there was something in place to fix (that was how long ago and nothing has been done to fix it except remove the taxes on the drug companies that make too much money already). The president needs to get a back bone and force a compromise. He is not having much luck working behind the scenes unless this is exactly what he wants.
Slavery was the law for over a century. Women didn’t have the right to vote. Birth Control was illegal.
They were all the law.
And yet, you state that THIS law must be held sacrosanct. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. And yes, the House has voted to repeal multiple times. And yet, none of those House Resolutions were voted on AT ALL by the Senate. If the repeal was given, so to speak, a “clean vote” in the Senate, I very much suspect we wouldn’t be here today. …
And the Senate was never ALLOWED to debate the law, or vote. That’s ALL on Harry Reid. When you can’t even bring the question to the floor. . ,. you CANNOT claim it was debated… .
Rants like the one Salgak started (Jesus Christ, by the way, JFC) makes me wish that public forums like this one had the option to mark a sub-thread in a discussion as “horribly off-topic” and hide it away. The entire back and forth. It would be like a special “biohazard”/“don’t feed the trolls” area, but tucked to the side - you could still get to it and let people rant it out on the sidelines.
Nobody is any wiser by listening to nutcases saying getting rid of healthcare is en par with getting rid of slavery. We should have the option, as a community, to remove them from the center stage and take away their megaphone. And after a number of “don’t feed the trolls” claims on a user account, they’d get hellbanned there automatically.
Pro-tip: Really, really do Hellbanning. It’s a great tool to limit the destructive influence of trolls. They think they’re still up there with their megaphone, everybody else can enjoy the conversation.
Bear in mind that the version of the ACA that passed was a compromise. The Republicans completely blocked passage of the bill as originally written. The final bill was a compromise with the Republicans changing the terms to be more compatible with what they wanted (including such changes as elimination of a single-payer system in favor of private insurance). The President doesn’t need to force a compromise, he and the Democrats already did compromise and now the GOP wants more compromise. And they won’t stop asking for “compromise” until they’ve gotten their way.
Some people say that the GOP didn’t get the message from the 2012 election. I think they did. I think they got the message loud and clear that public opinion’s shifting against their positions and that by the 2014 elections they aren’t going to be able to prevail, so anything they want they need to get through now before they lose their last bit of control in the House. I think it’s going to backfire on them.
First that’s not even loosely true - both houses were involved in debate with a series of compromises, amendments, and alterations happening as the bill went through the legislative process. There was a filibuster-proof vote to end debate that you might be referring to, though it would be a profoundly intellectually dishonest framing to suggest that that meant there wasn’t debate.
To say that they weren’t allowed to vote!? That flies in the face of the fact that it’s now law - it had to be voted on to pass.
More significantly, that’s completely irrelevant to the greater point, which is that the ACA is law and the legislative process for updating it should be followed. Perhaps you want to claim that two wrongs make a right?
Really, so if the senate had just called those resolutions to vote and voted them down - all 41 of them - then the republicans would currently be saying, “Well, they gave us a fair hearing, but obviously the senate doesn’t agree with our position and that’s how democracy works.” That’s what you are trying to say?
No, this law is not sacred, but it is law and the republicans have to accept that they are responsible for what they are doing. They have tried to repeal the law and they can’t. Now they are tying the repeal (no wait, delay, or at least some kind of concession on something so they don’t lose face) to funding the whole government. What they are doing is within their power and it is not illegal, but they are actually doing it. They know that no one likes what they are doing so they are trying to say that someone else is doing it.
Republicans have chosen to put the senate in an untenable position: if the senate decides that they will make concessions whenever the congress ties it to government funding then the senate becomes a rubber stamp with no power.
And why should the Senate take up repeal legislation that the President will not sign and for which Congress does not have a super-majority to override the veto? In some parts of the world, they might call that tilting at windmills. From where I sit, it looks like do-nothing dick-baggery.
Yes, because allowing people to buy affordable healthcare is just like slavery. You are nothing but a Republican tool, you would happily watch the country burn I suspect if you could blame it on the Democrats somehow. Again, I must make it clear I don’t have an loyalty for the Democrats. Though, at least they aren’t batshit insane and driving this country off a cliff when there is no reason to do so.
As for slavery being abolished, giving women the right to vote, and allowing people to have birth control. All of these were done through the legislative process. The Republicans have instead shutdown the government, and are threatening to let the US government default on what it owes. All because they don’t like a law. That is not going through the legislative process.
Anyway, I doubt you’ll read any of this. I am done trying to get through to your echo chamber.
The President isn’t the one who shut down the government. By what crazed rationale are monument staff more “essential” than the Center for Disease Control?
Reid and Obama don’t have to negotiate. The ACA isn’t a bill pending before congress, it’s established law that has already passed the Supreme Court’s edict for constitutionality. Like the ACA or not, the time to ask for “compromise” was before it passed every legislative hurdle available under our political process.
Two things. 1. Yes the president didn’t shut the government down but he is the one who band people from visiting the open air memorials. 2. If you noticed in my comment, I didn’t say he had to compromise on the ACA. I personally don’t like it but that is because it doesn’t actually solve the healthcare problem. It just postpones the problem by about 5 years at which point in will be disastrous since the bill doesn’t actually fix the underlying reasons for the healthcare costs. But setting that aside, he should be applying more pressure on congress to develop a solution and yes compromises are part of this process.
As a thought experiment, what would you think if Obama said that he wanted a clean CR on his desk, approval of all of his judicial appointees that Republicans have been blocking (for years), statehood for DC, an assault weapons ban, and a bill requiring mandatory background checks for any gun purchases through gun shows before he’ll sign the CR. Would you think that if the Republicans didn’t work with him on these things and make some concessions that they were REFUSING to negotiate?
