36. Would you support or oppose an effort by Congress to reinstate limits on corporate and union spending on election campaigns? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?
-------- Support -------- --------- Oppose -------- No
NET Strongly Somewhat NET Somewhat Strongly opinion
2/8/10 72 52 20 24 9 14 4
July 2010: Senate Dems lack votes to overcome Republican filibuster of Disclose Act
Senate legislation that would require corporations to make detailed public reports on political spending is expected to fail Tuesday afternoon. [...] Snowe told reporters before the weekly Republican luncheon that she considered it “premature” to support the bill.October 2010: Republicans' secret formula — 501(c)(4)
Sure, Republicans are exploiting a gap in the law to avoid disclosing their donors. But the real question is how did the Democrats allow themselves to be so badly outfoxed in the big-money competition?September 2010: Conservatives dominate campaign spending by interest groups
Interest groups and political parties reported $13.9 million in expenditures to the Federal Election Commission last week. Of that amount, 85 percent was spent on behalf of Republicans and 15 percent on behalf of Democrats.With the enormous amounts of anonymous cash set to pour into GOP coffers next year, does it matter if their candidate is on the weak side?
Fox has won something more important than an election; they've won the culture wars, to the extent that Democrats apologize for being Democrats and refuse to call themselves that epithet, "liberal".Meh, liberals just started calling themselves 'progressive', which I actually disagree with. The actual 'progressives' had some problematic ideas: like eugenics, and temperance. Woodrow Wilson was a huge racist, and terrible on civil liberties.
... consider what Democrats and Republicans just jointly did with regard to the Patriot Act, the very naming of which once sent progressives into spasms of vocal protest and which long served as the symbolic shorthand for Bush/Cheney post-9/11 radicalism:Top congressional leaders agreed Thursday to a four-year extension of the anti-terrorist Patriot Act, the controversial law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks that governs the search for terrorists on American soil.Indeed, we wouldn't want to have any messy, unpleasant democratic debates over "the expanded power the law gives to the government." Here we find yet again the central myth of our political culture: that there is too little bipartisanship when the truth is there is little in Washington but that.
The deal between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner calls for a vote before May 27, when parts of the current act expire. The idea is to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government. . . .
The thing that FOX has truly achieved is ubiquity in the public eye. Walk into any business that has a flat-panel hanging on the wall for the entertainment of waiting customers (including doctor's offices, dentists, jiffy lube, etc. etc.) and the chances are extremely high that it will be playing FOX News.That's probably because small business owners are much more likely to be conservative. I don't think most people get their news from reading closed captions on LCDs at random businesses.
I admit, I'd like single payer. But there's not enough fucking votes for it in Congress. -- IronmouthI'd just like to point out,again, that when HCR was passed, there were enough votes to include HCR in the 'patch' bill. Remember, there were two HCR bills, one was passed directly and included new regulations, and the second fixed the problematic senate bill but only included changes that were budgetary (which the public option would have been) and passed with less then 60 votes. I've pointed this out multiple times, but you keep lying about it. And you're obviously lying, because again, I've pointed this out multiple times.
Silly stuff like "General Betray Us" pushes people to the right just as much as charismatic tv and radio hosts pull them there. The left probably can't fight Fox News as effectively they can fight those within their own ranks who would make lame short-sighted puns and engage in a lot of mischaracterization.Yes, and Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and rush Limbaugh push people to the left. So what? Trying to "fight" people in your ranks is just an incredible waste of energy and not only that, it doesn't work. There is no 'central committee' of the left that can hand out dictats and punish people (like there seems to be on the Right, just look what happened to Newt Gingrich the other day, but that was for not hewing to a hard-core position of dismantling medicare, not saying anything mean about democrats)
Yes, by all means, pile on another insult. Group together. Try to single out an individual to call an outsider.It's called a derail. You're wasting everyone's time. And on top of that, you're really arrogant in whining about people not caring what you have to say. Other people have to decide whether or not what you say has any value to them, you can't just demand it.
It was, more than anything, a business decision. “It would be easy to look at Fox and think it’s conservative because Rupert and Roger are conservative and they program it the way they like. And to a degree, that’s true. But it’s also a business,” a person close to Ailes explained. “And the way the business works is, they control conservative commentary the way ESPN controls the market for sports rights. If you have a league, you have a meeting with ESPN, you find out how much they’re willing to pay, and then everyone else agrees to pay the same amount if they want it … It’s sort of the same at Fox.I don't know which I find more distasteful, the idea that FOX is run by a king-maker who personally gets to influence the direction of our elections, or that the whole country has been pushed hard to the right purely as a business decision on what media will sell best.
Also what does "passed directly" mean? HCR was "passed directly" by both Houses.passed with 50 votes, with no opportunity to filibuster.
and what does "passed with less than 60 votes" mean?passed with 50 votes, with no opportunity to filibuster.
This is what happened. The House passed a version of health care that was more expansive and included a public option. The Senate did not pass a version with the public option in it ... However, they brought a version to the floor without the public option. The GOP filibustered that version. The Dems defeated the filibuster with 60 votes.Yeah, not exactly. The important thing is that not one, but two health care bills were signed into law. The Affordible Care Act which was the main legislation, it was signed into law on March 23rd. In addition to that the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 was passed on march 30th.
...the House passed a version of the bill that corresponded to the Senate bill and Obama signed the legislation.
I am not sure what is meant by "new regulations" or "problematic senate bill." The fact you don't like a bill doesn't make it "problematic."
1) House votes on HCR, passes with a clean majoritySo the question is, why wasn't the public option included in the reconciliation act? People wanted to filibuster it, but they wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so. The irony is that before Scott Brown's election they said they couldn't do the Public Option because it would be filibustered in the senate, but after the election any bill would have been filibustered, so they went with this reconciliation work-around. So all Scott Brown's election actually did was remove their excuse for not including it.
2) Senate votes on a different version of HCR, with a bunch of pork and compromises in order to get 60 votes.
3) Scott brown gets elected, so the dems no longer have 60 votes.
Now at this point, if the senate bill was changed it could be filibustered again, so it wasn't.
4) instead of fixing the senate bill, the house passed the Health/Education reconciliation act on march 21st. And if you couldn't figure out from the name, the point was to pass it by reconciliation so it couldn't be filibustered.
5) On march 23rd, Obama signs the Affordable Care act.
6) On march 25th the senate passes the the reconciliation act is passed by reconciliation 56-43 with a few minor changes. There was never an opportunity for the republicans or anyone else to filibuster it. That same day the house passes the slightly modified version
7) On march 30th Obama signs the Reconciliation act
[I]f Reid did try using reconciliation, he could end up having to remove key parts of the legislation, not to mention hurting his party politically and losing an extra couple of votes in the Senate -- and, having done all that, he might well find out that he still needed 60 votes in order to get a public option approved.posted by Rhaomi at 4:34 PM on May 23, 2011
[...]
The problem is that budget reconciliation isn't really supposed to be used to make policy. Instead, as the Congressional Research Service's Robert Keith said in a 2008 report, reconciliation "is a procedure ... by which Congress implements budget resolution policies affecting mainly permanent spending and revenue programs." In the procedure's early years, however, it was used to circumvent the filibuster on provisions unrelated to that purpose. So in the 1980s, then-Minority Leader Robert Byrd led the Senate in a crackdown. What resulted was the Byrd Rule, which prohibits the Senate "from considering extraneous matter as part of a reconciliation bill."
The definition of "extraneous matter" is fairly broad, and subject to interpretation -- during the Bush administration, Republicans passed tax cuts using reconciliation -- but it generally includes any provision that fails one of these six criteria, as listed in Keith's CRS report:Even if a provision violates one of these rules, it won't automatically be stricken from a bill. In order for that to happen, a senator has to take action, generally by raising a point of order. Then, the chair (the majority leader or a designee) rules on whether to sustain that point of order and remove the offending part of the bill. That may seem like an easy victory in the making -- Reid rules that the public option passes the Byrd Rule's tests, and that's that -- but that's not necessarily the case.
- it does not produce a change in outlays or revenues;
- it produces an outlay increase or revenue decrease when the instructed committee is not in compliance with its instructions;
- it is outside of the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure;
- it produces a change in outlays or revenues which is merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision;
- it would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond the "budget window" covered by the reconciliation measure; and
- it recommends changes in Social Security
Liberals argue that the public option could survive the Byrd Rule, pointing to tax cuts that Republicans passed using reconciliation during the Bush administration as precedent, and arguing that the public option would pass the tests anyway because it would theoretically decrease the federal deficit.
They may have a point, but it doesn't much matter -- the only thing that does is the opinion of Alan Frumin, the Senate parliamentarian. Technically, Reid isn't required to abide by Frumin's judgment, but according to Robert Dove, who served twice as Senate parliamentarian, he will anyway. "It's not that they have to [listen to the parliamentarian]," Dove told Salon, "but absolutely they do ... The past history is that the view of the parliamentarian becomes the ruling of the chair."
If Reid did rule the public option out of order under the Byrd Rule, the whole point of using reconciliation would be rendered moot. The only way to overturn the chair's ruling in such a case would be with a three-fifths vote of the Senate -- that is, with the same 60 votes the majority leader would need to round up in order to defeat a filibuster. In that eventuality, there's no way Reid could get the supermajority; Lieberman would certainly abandon him, and moderate Democrats might too. Plus, Byrd has already expressed his distaste for the idea of using reconciliation for health reform, and could be expected to vote to support the rule that bears his name.
delmoi, passing the public option via reconciliation over the objection of the parliamentarian was an extremely controversial ideaWell, maybe it would be… but as far as I know the parliamentarian was never even asked whether or not it would violate the rule. And it would probably have been fine. Why are you assuming the parliamentarian would have ruled that the public option would have violated the byrd rule?
and multiple Democratic senators who supported the policy in principle suggested they'd vote against such a maneuver, including Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson, Byrd, and Rockefeller. And Lieberman, who didn't support a public option, period.What difference does it make? You would need ten democratic senators to vote against it, not six. 4 democrats voted against the Health/Education reconciliation act. It still passed.
Besides, even if such a vote succeeded, it would have left the legislation with a strong sense of illegitimacy, further weakening its support and further damaging the Democrats who passed it.Not any less illegitimate then the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act would have been anyway, since it was passed in exactly this way. And as we know today, no one cares about the 'patch' part of the bill.
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posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:45 PM on May 22, 2011 [11 favorites]