[| then it sounds like democrats should've been doing their damn *jobs* for those two years, full overdrive. democrats don't just construct slowly, they hardly construct at all when they have the chance to and completely fail to resist destruction when it happens. |]
Look at this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_U... They *were* in overdrive. You're just complaining they didn't do a decade of work in two years. Maybe if voters hadn't shit the bed in 2010 (GOP House), 2012 (GOP House), & 2014 (GOP House & Senate), Obama could've done even more things.
Please. The Dems' signature accompishment of the last 50 years is the ACA, a more conservative version of a bill originally written by the Heritage Foundation and signed into law in MA by Mittens Romney
And yet there are dozens more major legislative achievements than that in just the 111th Congress. That's the major *healthcare* accomplishment in the last several decades. But you can also look up the major legislative achievements of the 117th Congress (Biden's first 2 yrs), & 103rd (Clinton's).
[| and the major healthcare accomplishment is dogshit. look, i don't care how difficult it may seem, this is the livelihood of every american on the line. so democrats have a huge responsibility, and we have huge expectations, and if they can't even *look* like they're trying now, fuck them. |]
Can you count to 60? Or even just 50? You can't elect a Senate that has Lieberman as the 60th vote & complain you didn't get your way. He wasn't even a Democrat anymore by then, bc he lost the 2006 primary! If you elect the bare minimum & make a shitty person the pivotal vote, it's going to suck.
If you want better things, elect more Dems. What's easier, getting 50 out of 50, or getting 50 out of like 75? Do you prefer to have a threshold of 100%, or maybe only 67%? Likewise, don't elect a Senate where Manchin and/or Sinema are the 50th votes. It gives them veto power over everything.
If they were the 99th & 100th votes, they couldn't stop anything. Obviously, 100 Dems isn't feasible, but we used to routinely elect 60+, even 70+ Dems. The best Senate in my lifetime was the 111th, when Obama was elected. That was only marginally better than FDR's *worst* Senate. Margins matter!
[ just vote harder guys!!! it's the people's fault for voting wrong, not the government's fault for letting right wing propaganda run rampant, convincing the voterbase to vote wrong, while having and communicating no good values to them to vote for. ]
[ we need to do more than just fucking vote, that just passes responsibility onto whatever schmuck games more votes in the end. we need to *demand* shit from our politicians, we need to fight with grassroots activism, we need to change the party itself. ]
If you think the ACA is bad you should see what we had before
[ guys if you think *indentured servitude* is bad, you should see what we had before! absolutely commendable work from the government, we should stop being so hard on them. literally every other developed country has universal healthcare, the fact that we only have the ACA is a pathetic joke. ]
Path dependency is a thing. And you can say the ACA isn't great, but it's still an improvement on the status quo ante. It would've been great to go directly to UH, but Democrats didn't have the votes to do it, bc voters didn't elect enough Democrats to Congress. Elections have consequences.
If liberals had a whole country of their own, defending doing a quarter of a half measure would be the national passtime The ACA was passed the way it was to PREVENT nationalized healthcare. It was a way to protect the insurance cartels
It was passed the way it was bc voters didn't elect enough Democrats to Congress to pass something better! Elect enough Dems you can ignore Senators like Lieberman, Manchin, Sinema, et al. If their votes aren't necessary, then they can't hold us back.
[ they'd get fucking elected more if they had progressive values, or values at all really, instead of hiring focus group after focus group to somehow win votes from people who feel better represented by republicans anyway. ]
Who do you think is more cautious? One who knows their job is secure, or one who worries that the tiniest wrong move will cost them their job?
You’ll get no argument from me about that, but let’s not pretend there weren’t any more immediately pressing issues at the time
When you become a liberal, a magical elf comes to your door, hands you an enormous, beautifully gold-embossed blue book called "10,001 Excuses For Democrats!" and then disappears in a puff of delightful sparkles
[| then maybe you should stop pulling from it and actually have some expectations for politicians |]