VP Pence breaks tie, Senate votes to begin debating GOP bill to kill Obamacare in win for Trump

Continuing in the theme of “fuck John McCain” and “don’t think this can’t pass”…

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Only if your standards for heroism are rather low.

He was an unexceptional attack pilot, bombing targets of questionable legitimacy in pursuit of an unjust war. After being shot down, he was treated poorly, as were pretty much all POWs taken by either side in that conflict. Neither the North or South Vietnamese regimes were overly concerned with Geneva standards.

His conduct while a POW was mixed. His much-lauded refusal of early release was a matter of him following standard policy, as did pretty much all the other officers; he’d have been pilloried by the military if he’d accepted. His torture-induced pro-North “confession” was blameless but not heroic. Overall, his conduct while a POW seems to be not dissimilar to that of other captives.

If you want to argue that all POWs are heroes, you can. I wouldn’t.

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In a move that will likely define his legacy, a brain-damaged old man pushed for millions to lose health care…

…in other news, John McCain also voted in line with Trump’s push.

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When he ran for President, I never considered voting for McCain because he is a hothead and a douche-bag. LOL - I had no idea the depths of hot-headedness and douche-baggery could actually get elected President. That is all water under the bridge now.

Of course the full Senate should debate this on the open floor. I think it will quickly become apparent who are the idiots and who came to the Senate to serve. (That is both Republitard and Democrat alike.) The only viable solution is a 60 vote one, and when that becomes apparent the Tea-Party dumb-asses can go home and dream of licking Steve Bannon’s anus…

Democracy is not pretty…

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Democracy works just fine.

Unfortunately, the US is not a democracy.

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Gosh, it’s a good thing that Bernie’s fighting the good fight against this bill and taking it seriously.

berniewaltz

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Old people are bizarre.

A little bit down that page from that one…

http://www.theonion.com/features/news-in-brief

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It won’t. This is being roundly celebrated as a GOP victory, but nothing really happened here, at all. The few senators who stated opposition to the various GOP plans didn’t acquiesce to anything other than a simple procedural vote to move ahead with open floor debate and introduction of amendments. They didn’t change their vote whatsoever. In fact, it should be alarming to everyone on the right that, with a majority the GOP senate still required a VP tie-breaking vote just to open debate. All of these bills have been litigated on the public stage and not a single one of them has the support needed to pass.

Oh, and one of them is already dead.

EDIT: It actually makes perfect sense for the opposition senators to vote for this. It makes it look like they’re still in alignment with the party in a very public way, but they still have the ability to vote against any actual legislation. Since there are three bills and about a billion amendments to review their opposition will be obscured by all of pointless the noise. I think they all know it’s dead.

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Why is the fact that McCain is receiving world-class health care on the taxpayer dime while serving the party who is trying to take away health coverage for millions not relevant?

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I’ve sat here trying to think of something to say, and I’ve got nothing. This is a transparent miscarriage of justice, the people have spoken, loudly and indicated that they do not want this and yet here we are, with John McCain giving a thumbs up to his cronies indicating they’ve cleared another hurdle in the process of indirectly killing thousands, possibly millions of people.

These people belong in prison.

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Well, he is an unrepentant wife beater.
So there’s that.

Well, maybe 43 of them do. As I (and the brown mouse) said, the vote discussed in this thread didn’t really mean much, if anything.

"Late Tuesday night, the Senate voted 57-43 to block a wide-ranging proposal by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell replacing Obama’s statute with a far more restrictive GOP substitute. "

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The repeal/replace nonsense they’re proposing was dead without this vote. Now it’s alive.

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It was always going to be alive. They were never going to abandon their efforts to repeal Obamacare.

I can see why you’re optimistic, but this is not good, this is clearly a meaningful step towards the bad. Without this vote, they were at serious risk of being unable to put together something before the budget discussion in October, after which they’d need 60 votes and it would be dead.

With this vote, they are well within the realm of miraculously pushing something through (even if carelessly because they have to do it with only 20 hours of debate(!)) on 50 votes that will ruin my life. This vote fucking meant something to me.

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I started to type a less eloquent version of what you just said and deleted it.

This vote puts a ticking clock on the process and ensures that the any bill passed will necessarily be rushed and careless. The goal for them long since ceased to be to do any specific thing, and is now only to do something, which is a dangerous place for the country.

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been there, done that. it can be a relief to be an ex-pat. for a time. but, i missed home, friends, and spoken english.

I’ve been in France for five years now, and haven’t regretted one moment of it. I pretty much started angling that way ever since the coup put George III in office, and started in earnest on seeing the insane monkey feces thrown at Obama.

To be fair, I already spoke French, albeit poorly. However, if language is an issue-- there’s New Zealand, and in the Scandanavian countries and the Netherlands everyone speaks English as well as their native language.

(For that matter, many of the French do too, it’s a required course in public school. They just would prefer you at least make an effort to speak their language first. Don’t tell me that’s odd, since most Americans are even worse-- no foreign language requirement in schools, “English is the official language!”, etc.)

So, yeah, it can be a bit tough at times (though it hasn’t been for me), but it is damn well worth it. Now if we can just get that asshat Macron beat down on the paleoeconomic bullshit…

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My musings in defense of McCain have been utterly annihilated by him voting for the bill after saying he couldn’t do that.

Not to be a dick, but is the tumor making him confused? Saying you can support a bill in its current state and then voting for it six hours later is either breathtakingly pointless and stupid lying or it is a sign of real incoherence.

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