Word: bills
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...defeat. With health care reform currently hanging by a thread and panic spreading through the Democratic ranks, it feels less like 1933 than 1993 - when another charismatic, inexperienced President prematurely tested the ice of post-Reagan liberalism, only to find it wouldn't support his activist agenda. Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama has been criticized for misreading his mandate, spending his political capital on health care reform at a time when millions fear for their jobs. It was as if FDR had devoted his first Hundred Days to promoting Social Security instead of a smorgasbord of emergency relief...
...Bill W. Chandler, the office administrator at Lexington’s Gay and Lesbian Services Organization, disagrees...
...government can employ people quickly and effectively. The first step must be for the government to extend aid to states in order to save the jobs of teachers, civil servants, and local employees such as firefighters and policemen. Such aid was extended in Obama’s stimulus bill and helped save a great deal of jobs, but with almost every state running deficits and with a few even approaching bankruptcy, states would be forced to make difficult decisions if this aid were to run out. In addition to this, therefore, the government must build on the efforts...
...Senate election in January deprived the Democrats of the 60th vote that it takes to block one. "The Republicans' indiscriminate use of the filibuster has made it all but impossible to conduct everyday business in the Senate. On an almost daily basis, the Republican minority - just 41 Senators - stops bills from even coming to the floor for debate and amendment," Democratic Senator Tom Harkin wrote recently in the Huffington Post. "In the 1950s, an average of one bill was filibustered in each two-year Congress. In the last Congress, 139 bills were filibustered. The Republican abuse of the filibuster...
...early in the year - which is where we are now - forcing a real filibuster could be a useful exercise, one that makes a point far more effectively than all the whining we are hearing about Republican abuse of the rules. If what the majority is offering is a bill that the public really wants, there will be a price to pay for talking it to death. There will be a reason to actually try to work out the differences between the two sides. Even if the Democrats ultimately lose, the voters will at least understand what the fight...