They’ll be as subtle as they think they can afford to be.
Disenfranchisement in the USA already has:
The gerrymander.
Felon disenfranchisement combined with racially-biased mass incarceration.
Weekday voting combined with minimal industrial rights, making it functionally impossible for many working class people to vote.
Recent additions are:
Voter ID laws, deliberately targeted to exclude the poor.
The near elimination of postal and early voting across the red states.
Racially targeted mass purges of voters from the rolls, combined with restriction of the ability to meaningfully appeal deregistration.
The annihilation of the Voting Rights Act by the USSC.
They spent the last election loudly suggesting that they were going to ramp up in-person voter intimidation, but didn’t follow through; just the threat was effective enough this time.
But they will ramp it up to whatever degree is necessary. If they can do it with just ID laws, they’ll do that. If they have to have a posse of open-carry Trumpeters standing outside every voting booth and threatening every non-white person they see, they’ll do that.
Again, these tactics don’t have to be 100% effective to work. They just need to have enough of an effect to skew that 40% vote into 51% of the seats.
You can do that with gerrymandering alone if you’re sufficiently shameless about it.
Interestingly Uber seems to be run by people as dysfunctional as Trump, and the result is that the company president has quit over the behaviour of the management.
Perhaps in a reversal, the US should quit over the behaviour of its president.
Respectfully, Democrats can and absolutely should obstruct Trumpublicans on their endeavors to gut regulation and hand everything to plutocrats on a tax-sheltered plate. That legislation absolutely does not need to happen. I agree that Pence would be worse. It would never get to Ryan because if Trump got impeached for treason and the Senate upheld the conviction and his removal (an unlikely and unprecedented outcome), Pence would not be half as careless. Even if Trump did commit treason, the Trumpublican Congress won’t impeach him. So we’re stuck with him for at least two years and probably four.
Either way, I agree local is key insofar as we need to take back the Congress if only to block Trump’s fire-sale of the federal government.
But people seem to be celebrating his unpopularity a little prematurely. Perhaps they forget the lesson of the election, that there’s a big pasty demographic that doesn’t answer polls but worships trollies.
I guess I am using the word Obstruction with a very narrow definition. Voting down a bill is the legislative process, and is their damn jobs. Using arcane rules based on traditions made in back room talks to prevent bills from even reaching a vote is obstruction.
Always define your terms, @japhroaig, otherwise people won’t know what the carp you are saying
It’s really hard to vote down bills when you’re in the minority and the majority has circled the ideological wagons so tightly that defections are basically unheard of.
In that case, while I’d prefer things get decided by coming to a vote, my idealism takes a back-seat to the Black Knight Paul Ryan using budget rules to gut the Affordable Care Act because he can’t get the votes to actually repeal it. 25 million people’s health insurance > my idealism. At this point, it’s war by other means and enemies aren’t defeated in war by clean fighting.
I know that doesn’t sound like my usual high-principled outlook. All I can say is that 2016 took my ideals about fair above-board play and stuffed them through a wood chipper.
Oh, I understand. And I am not so arrogant to think I have the answers. I just have this sneaking suspicion that playing by the idealistic rules while building populist support is a better strategy. Not tactic, but strategy.
The biting irony here is that the budget proposal and sequestration are literal death panels. Yet the idea is so toxic we can’t have a rational discussion across the aisle.
If we have to play dirty, we will. I don’t think I’ve ever won a fair fight. However my idealism defines my character.
For the purposes of your comment, ignore the focus on McCain, and note how the chart has become even more skewed to the right. Note, this is for all senators, not just ®
Interestingly, after a couple of years experience with ACA I get the sense - mainly from watching several town halls - that people now realise that ACA didn’t introduce death panels, and that what came before ACA, and what’s coming down the pike with AHCA, is the kind of thing that involves actual death panels; Republican ideologues deciding which classes of people will be allowed to die coupled with faceless insurance-industry functionaries making the some decision on a one-by-one case-by-case basis.
On the upside, the prompt (R) effort to re-brand AHCA as ‘RyanCare’ (c.f. the (R) effort to demonise ACA as ‘ObamaCare’) probably tells you as much as you need to know about the likelihood it’ll ever actually pass.
First off, forgetting about the negative connotation of “death panels”, there does need to be some form of community effectiveness rating for insurers. If you create a drug or a procedure that increases late-stage Alzheimer’s patients’ lifespan by an average of 3.5 weeks, with 2% of the test subjects living an additional 1 or more years, but with little to no cognitive improvement, and it costs $40,000 to administer - should insurance cover it?
And of course the much more important consideration is the opportunity cost of that money: what else could we do with that money instead? What other programs could we fund, what treatments could we provide, etc?
This is what a “death panel” really is - it’s saying:
There is some number between 0 and 100 which is the percentage of our GDP we should be spending on healthcare.
As that number moves upwards from 0 to 100, we expect certain outcomes from our inflows.
Tying costs to outcomes is the only rational solution to this.
A group of people - let’s call it a panel - need to perform this outcome-cost analysis and make decisions about coverage.
Sometimes these decisions will negatively affect people at the margins, which may mean they die weeks or even months sooner than they would’ve had the decision gone the other way.
Ergo, death panel.
But the reality is that either way that decision goes, someone’s health outcomes will suffer as a result. Insurers, providers, and patients already make these exact same choices every day.
[quote=“JonS, post:114, topic:97398”]
On the upside, the prompt ® effort to re-brand AHCA as ‘RyanCare’ (c.f. the ® effort to demonise ACA as ‘ObamaCare’) probably tells you as much as you need to know about the likelihood it’ll ever actually pass.
[/quote]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/844232766711648256
They are never, ever going to be able to wash their hands from AHCA which is why it probably cannot pass. Breitbart tried to brand is as Ryancare to defend Trump, but the most prominent ® in the country tweets about it nearly daily. Even if it doesn’t pass it already has hurt the GOP, and if it doesn’t pass Trump’s tantrum will make things even worse. They are in a no win situation (fortunately).
No kidding - you forget where I live Here the “death panel” is called Pharmac, and they do a fantastic job. So good that they were under serious threat of extinction from the TPPA. About every 6-12 months they hit the headlines for failing to fund some very expensive drug that is marginally effective which some media-friendly patient missed out on. Their response is always the same: “The govt gives us $700m^ per year to buy drugs. Yes, we could buy WondaDrug300, but it costs $5m per year, per person. That same amount buys us treatment for 4,000 cancer patients, or 16,000 people with heart disease, or 23,000 diabetes courses.” (And the govt, ever responsive to something that could lose them votes, often then gives Pharmac the money to buy WondaDrug300 … which is great, but neatly ignores the argument just made). The last WondaDrug300 I recall was Herceptin.^^
But there is a stark difference between “death panels” making decisions based on science to achieve the best population health outcomes possible within a given budget on the one hand, and death panels making decisions based in ideological dogma or the pursuit of personal profit on the other.
As always, intent matters.
^or whatever the figure is
^^ which I acknowledge isn’t the greatest example, but it is the most recent one I can remember.
)
Here the “death panel” is called 