Looking For A Few Good Women
Phew! Just when it looked like those rascally Blue Dogs would crush the whole health care reform debate before it even started, the Southern Bobbsey Twins, Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA), figured why the hell not call their own bluff and let the Senate debate the one piece of legislation it has spent the better part of the year crafting to provide affordable medical care to millions of people. True American heroes, those two!
Yes, thanks to this dynamic duo from the dirty South, the Senate lovingly voted 60-39 along perfectly partisan lines to actually allow debate on the controversial health care reform bill to turn America into Soviet Russia and bless us humble peasants with a chance to maybe, just maybe have a health care system that doesn’t treat the public as living, breathing (but hopefully not for long) get-rich-quick schemes.
This means that after Thanksgiving, Democrats and Republicans will offer hundreds of amendments and debate important matters like death panels and Nazis for several weeks before holding yet another procedural supermajority vote–this time, on whether to end debate. If that gets the magic numero 60, the Senate will have the delightful task of holding an up-or-down vote on passage of the bill.
But fear not because loyal(?) Democrats Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu would like the American people to know that they’ll switch their vote and kill the sh*t out of the bill if there is anything even remotely resembling a public option, so help them God.
“Let me be perfectly clear,” Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) said on the floor of the Senate. “I am opposed to a new government administered health care plan as a part of comprehensive health insurance reform, and I will not vote in favor of the proposal that has been introduced by Leader Reid as it is written…I’ve already alerted the Leader and I’m promising my colleagues that I’m prepared to vote against moving to the next stage of consideration as long as a government-run public option is included.”
Same goes for that Mary lady.
“I believe it’s going to be very clear at some point very soon that there are not 60 votes for the current provision in the bill, and that the leader and the leadership are going to have to make a decision and I trust that they will figure out how to do that,” Landrieu said.
Yay! After a century-old tradition of Ass-Backwards Conservative Southern Democrats siding with the GOP to kill liberal reforms and any progress in general, these two li’l ladies were finally persuaded to not act like Joe Lieberman’s evil stepsisters and do the right thing by supporting their party in a landmark bill to help Americans not die.
Or at least enough to bring the socialist piece of sh*t to debate so they could really say what they think. Which is of course that they despise it and want nothing to do with it or its grandma-murdering death squads. Except Blanche Lincoln, who may or may not like it, depending on how much she wants to get smashed in the primaries by a real, pro health care reform Democrat come 2010.
But either way, at least everyone can share a hearty laugh when they strip out the public option and crazy Republicans still call this a “government takeover of health care” and Blanche Lincoln still loses and everyone still dies from lack of coverage.
Hooray!