Filibuster Cartoons
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This Sunday has been declared D-Day by House Democrats, and is intended to represent the final major push to get President Obama’s beleaguered healthcare reform bill through the sausage factory of the legislative process.
It’s so hard to follow what is actually in the bill anymore. It literally changes from day to day as Democratic leaders try to water-down and mollify any content that is even slightly controversial in any way to ensure they can scrape together the bare minimum of votes necessary to bumble the thing through Congress.
The Republicans have deemed it a “far-left” bill, but in reality much of the far-left is just as consumed with substantial concerns as the far-right. Notable lefties like Michael Moore and Denis Kucinich have blamed Pelosi and Reid’s numerous opportunistic sops to conservative congressmen for destroying any hope of truly progressive reform to the health insurance system, characterizing the ensuring remnants as just a lot of tinkering-around-the-edges band-aid solutions. Yet the righties are so convinced that the very premise of the bill, in any form, represents such a severe existential calamity for the country they won’t acknowledge that any progress whatsoever has been made in the last 13 months of debate.
It’s entirely possible this bill could ultimately go the way of the failed immigration reform effort of some years back, and end up collapsing under the weight of its own compromise-driven bloat.
The greatest strength of the American political system is the power afforded to each individual member of Congress to influence legislation. It’s also the greatest roadblock to achieving sweeping reform of any major social problem… though I guess that can be a strength as well, depending on where you come from.
