The conservative Democrat minority that has been running the show - the Blue Dog Caucus - and voting with the crazed, obstructionist GOP, may have to make a decision real real soon about whether they're going to go down with the sinking Republican ship. And the rest of the party will have to decide if it wants to ride to the bottom with them.
What I'm talking about is Mitch McConnell's open, undisguised, blanket admission that it doesn't matter what the Democrats put in their healthcare plan, the Republicans will oppose it.
The Senate Republican leader made clear on Wednesday that his party, despite all its griping over the public health insurance option, abortion-funding or health care for illegal immigrants, is simply and flatly opposed to the "core" of the Democratic health care reform proposal.
Satisfying every Republican demand short of scrapping the entire project, said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), would still not capture GOP support.
(emphasis added)
The Blue Dogs would appear on the surface to have been working for something that would allow some form of Obama's vaunted "bipartisanism" to bring in Republican votes. Now McConnell says it doesn't matter what they do, the Pubs won't vote for it. That kind of leaves the BD's in a bind. Although according to Steve Benen, the WH sees that as a problem rather than an opportunity.
In August, MSNBC's John Harwood mentioned something to Paul Krugman that stood out for me: "I gotta tell you what a White House official told me today: 'Our problem right now is, if we tell some of the Republican opponents in the Senate, 'You can have everything you want in the bill,' they still won't vote for it.'"
Uh-huh. So as many of us have been saying since Obama won, fuck the Pubs. Do it without em. But apparently that is not, as Nancy Pelosi would say, "on the table". Harry Reid and Pelosi both say they "don't have the 60 votes" it would take to beat the threat of a filibuster (with Reid, all they have to do is threaten, they don't actually have to do it) but that's because...of the conservative Democrats. The BD's. Who would vote with the GOP, thus keeping the numbers below filibuster failsafe.
But if the Pubs are going to be upfront about being against anything the Democrats do, that puts their BD tail in a dusty, muddy drag behind them. When will the BD's call it quits? If the liberal Dems in the Senate (who outnumber the BD's by a considerable margin) put pressure on the BD's to "act like Democrats", the GOP will no longer be providing any cover at all for the BD's. Either they're going to have to vote with their own party or they're going to go off the Republican cliff.
It's a dilemma. (Try not to grin like that.)
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