Bernie Sanders Winning The Battle On Health Care, Now Max Baucus Caves On Opposition To Single Payer

September 8, 2017 — Ron Chusid

Bernie Sanders’ proposal for single-payer health care was viciously attacked by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, but now Sanders is winning the debate in the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris already joined on as a co-sponsor, indicating how she sees this as the expected position for a serious contender for the 2020 nomination. It came as no surprise when Elizabeth Warren also decided to co-sponsor the legislation. The real surprise was when former Senator Max Baucus changed his position:

It’s time for America to consider seriously a single-payer, government-run health system, says Max Baucus, Montana’s longest serving U.S. senator, former ambassador to China and one of the chief architects of Obamacare.

“My personal view is we’ve got to start looking at single-payer,” Baucus said Thursday night at Montana State University. “I think we should have hearings…. We’re getting there. It’s going to happen.”

This is significant as Baucus was a chief author of the Affordable Care Act, and was strongly opposed to even considering a single payer plan eight years ago. David Weigel provides this history lesson:

Eight years ago, as a once-in-a-generation Democratic Senate supermajority debated health-care reform, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) kept their focus narrow. As the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Baucus was focused on passing a reform bill that moderate Republicans could support. At one point, he had single-payer health-care supporters removed from a hearing; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an advocate for Canada-style universal coverage, set up a meeting to tide them over. But he did not expect much from Baucus.

“[Is he open] to single-payer?” Sanders asked rhetorically. “Not in a million years.”

His estimate was just 999,993 years off. At a Thursday night forum in his home state, a now-retired Baucus suggested that single-payer health care could pass, and not too long from now.

It gets worse per this account from Common Dreams:

Baucus declared single payer “off the table” and had single-payer proponents arrested after they disrupted a committee hearing. Those arrested were later called the “Baucus 8.”

Dr. Pat Salomon, who was arrested alongside other physicians and activists, explained why the protests were necessary:

When we looked at the list of 41 people testifying in the three days of the Finance Committee’s roundtable on healthcare, we saw that not a single witness was an advocate of the principle that healthcare should be a fundamental human right for all in America, nor was there anyone to speak for the majority of the American people who support single-payer Medicare for All.

Maybe this is a case of a politician speaking more honestly once out of office, or perhaps it is a sign of how much Bernie Sanders has moved the discussion of health care reform. Just to raise Peter Daou’s blood pressure further in case he happens to read this, I’ll also point out that Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America, while Hillary Clinton’s favorability has continued to fall since the election, and is below that of Donald Trump. Sanders being right, and Clinton being wrong, in supporting Medicare for All is just one of many reasons for this.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, Health Care, Hillary Clinton. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »

After September It Will Be Even Harder For Republicans To Repeal Obamacare

September 2, 2017 — Ron Chusid

Donald Trump has, fortunately, been able to accomplish very little as president. Obstacles have included his complete lack of understanding of how government works and widespread opposition to his plans. He has already had considerable difficulty keeping his campaign promise to repeal Obamacare. Should Senate Republicans try again, repealing the Affordable Care Act will become even harder as the ability to pass this with fifty-one as opposed to sixty votes ends September 30.

Bloomberg News reports:

The Senate parliamentarian told lawmakers that Republicans’ ability to pass an Obamacare replacement with just 51 votes expires at the end of this month, Senator Bernie Sanders said Friday.

The preliminary finding complicates any further efforts by Republican leaders in Congress to pass a comprehensive GOP-only replacement for the health-care law.

Sanders, a Vermont independent, in a statement called the determination a “major victory” for those who oppose repealing Obamacare.

Senate Republicans, who control the chamber 52-48, failed to win enough support for their Obamacare replacement in July as three GOP lawmakers joined Democrats to oppose the measure. Republican leaders haven’t ruled out reviving their effort, and some party members — including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas — say they’re talking to colleagues about a possible broad-based bill.

Earlier guidance from Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough dogged Republicans in their Obamacare replacement effort throughout the summer. In late July, she issued a preliminary finding that key parts of a proposal drafted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t qualify for the fast-track procedure, dramatically complicating the already slimming prospects of passing a bill.

After the 2017 budget resolution which allows for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act expires at the end of September, both houses would need to pass a new budget resolution to enable repeal to pass with only fifty-one votes. It is considered unlikely that Congress would be able to deal with both health care and rewriting the tax code at the same time this fall, but we are also seeing a lot of things lately which we would have previously considered to be unlikely.

New York Magazine has more on this.

Meanwhile Democrats are attempting to take health care reform further with Bernie Sanders introducing legislation promoting a single payer plan, with Kamala Harris co-sponsoring the legislation. This has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress. It is a favorable sign that a moderate Democrat such as Harris with presidential ambitions finds it more expedient to be on the side of a single-payer plan, in comparison to last year when Hillary Clinton vigorously opposed the idea.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Congress, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, Republicans. Tags: , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Howard Dean Attacks Democratic Left, Forgetting What He Said About Restoring Principle To The Party In 2003; Hillary Clinton And The Resistance

August 6, 2017 — Ron Chusid

After Howard Dean turned into a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, it was no longer necessary to point out what a hypocrite he is.  While unnecessary, I can’t resist pointing this out. While I quickly found that he couldn’t be trusted back in the 2004 campaign, it is worth remembering that he claimed to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.

Bob Edwards asked him what he meant by that and Dean explained:

Former Vermont Gov. HOWARD DEAN: That was really a phrase that was first developed by Paul Wellstone, and although Paul Wellstone’s probably a little more liberal than I, his characteristic, which I enormously admire, was that he’s willing to stand up for what he believes in. I think there are so many people in our party that aren’t. When I go around talking to Democratic audiences, one of the lines that gets an enormous round of applause is that there are almost as many Democrats that I talk to that are angry at the Democrat Party as they are angry at the Republican Party.

EDWARDS: Well they wouldn’t be Democrats otherwise, would they?

DEAN: Well, that’s true. But people just don’t feel like the Democrats have stood up against this president who’s got really what amounts to, essentially, a radical agenda.

EDWARDS: The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, would that be the wing that loses national elections?

DEAN: It’s the wing that wins national elections because they restore principle to the party, and without principle we’re never going to beat this president.

Restore principle to the party. So what does Howard Dean say now about those who want to restore principle to the party? The Hill reports, Former DNC chair criticizes ‘whiny’ left:

Former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean ripped what he called the “whiny” portion of the Democratic Party on Saturday in response to criticism of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) by a number of progressives.

“There has always been a section of the left, which I call the whiny party — the party that doesn’t really wanna win, they just wanna be pure, and if they go down swinging purely, then that’s fine,” Dean, who ran for president in 2004, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on “AM Joy.”

Dean was right about how to win elections in 2003. Unfortunately Democratic leaders, including Dean, have forgotten that, and no longer win many elections.

Speaking about losers, in related news BuzzFeed News reports, Hillary Clinton Hires Two Former Campaign Aides For “Resistance” PAC. That should serve as a reminder that Hillary Clinton has not gone away. Unfortunately she does not realize that she is a big part of what we are resisting.

Besides her PAC, Clinton has her book of excuses coming out, and then will be on her book promotion tour. Politco has this editorial cartoon regarding her upcoming book:

Posted in Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Politics. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »

Establishment Democrats Relying On New McCarthyism To Attack The Left As They Move To The Right

August 4, 2017 — Ron Chusid

With the Democratic Party moving right, becoming increasingly like the Republican Party of circa 2002, while current Republicans have become even further detached from reality, they have also increasingly been attacking the left. We already have gone through the last election watching Hillary Clinton campaign against Medicare for All, promoting restrictions on civil liberties, and defending her failed history of neocon interventionism, while her supporters attributed criticism from the left to sexism, and have moved closer towards embracing neoconservativism. This may have just foreshadowed what to expect in the future.

Ryan Cooper recently discussed how the left questions establishment Democrats such as  Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick over their records. He predicted in The Week how the Democratic establishment will respond by continuing to play dirty against the left:

..if they just want to have a retread of the 2015-16 primary, the center could just try to win dirty. The left, they might say (working hand-in-glove with sympathetic columnists), just doesn’t like minority or female candidates because they are racist and sexist.

I would bet quite a lot of money the centrist Democratic establishment will opt for the latter strategy. Indeed, some are already doing so — like Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress, elite Democrats’ in-house think tank.

That would be pretty rich coming from the crowd that shamelessly leveraged Islamophobia to keep Keith Ellison — probably the left’s second-most trusted politician, after Bernie Sanders — out of the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Of course that is what we are already seeing. Just today Shareblue has a defense of Kamala Harris which resorts to such dirty attacks, claiming that the objection to Harris from the left is that she “shares a gender with Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

Such attacks on the left based upon false claims of misogyny are especially absurd considering that many people who ultimately backed Sanders had previously supported Elizabeth Warren before she declined to run. Some wound up voting for Jill Stein. Many are now backing Tulsi Gabbard for the 2020 nomination. (Many of us are also excited about Jodie Whittaker breaking the glass ceiling in the TARDIS.)

Many of the most vile attacks on Bernie Sanders and the left have come from former Clinton staffer Peter Daou, who runs Shareblue. The Washington Free Beacon showed a recent tirade from Daou on Twitter within the past week. Conservative Democrats (often labeled centrists in light of how far right the middle has moved in American politics) have become the major opponents of liberal and progressive ideas, while turning to the tactics of the far right.

George Zornick responded to MyCarthy style attacks on Bernie Sanders from Peter Daou and Melissa McEwan in an article at The Nation entitled, Bernie Sanders Is a Russian Agent, and Other Things I Learned This Week: A case study in how fake news is attracting liberals. He pointed out how Peter Daou has started a string of accusations that Sanders is practically a Russian agent based upon false claims:

The jumping-off point seems to have been when Peter Daou, an avowed Hillary Clinton fan and major Twitter personality, quoted-tweeted my original post. Daou spends almost as much time energetically trashing Sanders as he does attacking Trump, and many of the respondents were followers of his. He certainly did not imply Sanders was a secret KGB asset, though, writing only: “Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul were the ONLY TWO VOTES **AGAINST** the Russia sanctions bill. Bernie was out of sync with every Dem senator.” (It was a Russia/Iran sanctions bill, and Sanders made it clear he objected only to the Iran part, but never mind.)

Sanders made his position quite clear, including on his web site, but such facts are irrelevant to anti-liberal hatchet men like Daou who are more interested in Swift Boating Sanders (even if Sanders’ concerns were also expressed by John Kerry). If anything, I think that Sanders has been too accepting of the Democratic party line on Russia, which goes far beyond the facts which have been established. Despite this, while Daou’s followers on social media have found it a sign of extremism that Sanders and Paul voted together, I see a view shared by two Senators who frequently differ from their party’s orthodoxy to be worthy of consideration.

Zornick went on:

So how did people jump to this conclusion that Bernie Sanders, by opposing Democrats, must ipso facto be working at the behest of Russia? It wasn’t entirely organic. And it points to how fake news can infect some of our brethren on the left.

Blame starts with the people with megaphones that peddle this nonsense. Eric Garland, who became a Twitter celebrity with his bizarre “game theory” thread, has explicitly tied Sanders to Russia in his threads. So has Melissa McEwan on her Shakesville blog. “Bernie Sanders, who has visited Russia, has not been, to my knowledge, suspected of being vulnerable by Russian kompromat cultivated on his visits, unlike Donald Trump. But, as I said above, if I intend to say something, I will state it plainly, and here I am plainly stating that I do believe these connections warrant more scrutiny,” she wrote. The Palmer Report, which churns out Russia-related fake news by the pixel load, wrote a post in April: “Bernie Sanders must disclose what he knows about his campaign adviser Tad Devine and Russia.” And of course, uber-grifter Louise Mensch has joined the conspiracy theorists.

We have a long way to go until the 2020 primary battles and can expect to see far more of such dirty tactics from conservative Democrats who place victory for someone with a D after their name over principle, failing to understand that their abandonment of principle is a major reason why Democrats have been on such a losing streak and could not even beat Donald Trump.

Update: 

Democrats Risk Blowback On Russia Narrative

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Blogs & Social Media, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, Foreign Policy & National Security, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Jill Stein, John Kerry, Politics. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . No Comments »

Democrats Again Show They Stand For Nothing Beyond Desperately Trying To Win Elections

July 31, 2017 — Ron Chusid

The Democratic Party showed in 2016 that principles mean nothing to them. They overlooked Hillary Clinton’s rather blatant pay for play racket at the State Department, justified her violation of the rules Obama established to promote government transparency, and didn’t care that her policies violated pretty much everything liberal Democrat had previously said they believed in. By 2016 they were essentially running on the platform of George Bush and Dick Cheney, except that Clinton supposedly would be liberal on women’s issues. Now many of the same women who were willing to ignore all principles to support Clinton, such as Melissa McEwan, are shocked to see that the Democratic Party has no qualms about also throwing them under the bus with regards to reproductive rights.

The Hill reports, Dem campaign chief vows no litmus test on abortion:

Democrats will not withhold financial support for candidates who oppose abortion rights, the chairman of the party’s campaign arm in the House said in an interview with The Hill.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said there will be no litmus tests for candidates as Democrats seek to find a winning roster to regain the House majority in 2018.

“There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” said Luján, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.”

In taking the position, Luján and Democrats risk alienating liberals, as well as groups dedicated to promoting access to abortion and reproductive health services that represent the core of the party’s base.

“Throwing weight behind anti-choice candidates is bad politics that will lead to worse policy,” said Mitchell Stille, who oversees campaigns for NARAL Pro-Choice America. “The idea that jettisoning this issue wins elections for Democrats is folly contradicted by all available data.”

Is anyone really surprised? The Democrats have tried to run as a Republican-lite Party in 2010, 2014, and in 2016 despite losing every time, even to a candidate as terrible as Donald Trump. Their last presidential nominee supported the worst abuses under George Bush–neoconservative interventionism, restrictions on civil liberties, and increased government secrecy. Wikileaks also revealed that Clinton was perfectly happy with Jeb Bush’s economic message.

Those who backed Clinton seeing her as their champion on women’s issues would probably also have been disappointed if she had won and went on to triangulate on these issues, having already expressed a willingness to compromise with Republicans to keep abortion rare.

Democrats showed they learned nothing after losing in 2016, continuing to move to the right. The showed their lack of interest in principles in concentrating on coming up with a new slogan rather than policies. As Nancy Pelosi admitted this “is not a course correction, but it’s a presentation correction.” They have been trying to recruit blue dog Democrats to run. They have showed no interest in reforming the undemocratic nomination rules which make their nominations little different than picking the nominee in the old smoked filled rooms. Kamala Harris, seen as a major prospect to run in 2020, dismisses sticking up for principles as applying ideological purity tests.

Republicans stress their principles, no matter how crazy, and win. Democrats only alienate those who desire more liberal principles by moving to the right, but still do not pick off Republican voters.

I can see making exceptions as opposed to using absolute an litmus test for every issue, possibly backing a candidate who fails on abortion but otherwise has a strong record. Instead we have seen Democrats move so far to the right that they differ from Republicans on little other than reproductive rights. If they now ignore this, it leaves a party which stands for absolutely nothing other than trying to win elections. The pathetic thing about this is that moving to the right has never been a successful strategy for Democrats.

Posted in Democrats, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Republicans, Scandals, Social Issues. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »
«
»