And yes, the Democrats were united in bringing this monstrosity to the floor for debate.
It was entirely a straight party line vote. Ohio Republican George Voinivich decided to miss the vote, but in the end it affected nothing.
This vote is simply a motion to proceed with debate, amendments, etc. on the floor. It could go on for quite some time. Tom Coburn (r-OK), for instance wants the Senate clerk to read every word of the 2,000 page bill on the Senate floor,although that probably won't happen.And Senator Lieberman, who owes the Democrats absolutely nothing at this point has pledged a filibuster.
There will be another cloture vote after all this, to end debate and vote onthe bil itself,and we may see a few Dems defect.
Although once again, I want to emphasize that the White House and Harry Reid have already said that they if they can't get the votes in the Senate, they will shove ObamaCare through by a fraudulent use of the reconciliation process ( it's supposed to be used for emergency budget matters only), locking the GOP out of the room and putting together whatever they want with Pelosi and her 'droids in the House.
Well and good,if it's comes to that. Let's force the bastards to foist this on the American people. And reap the inevitable fallout.
On the bright side, while a lot of federal money will be wasted and further damage done to the economy, most of this garbage can be repealed because th eimplementation doesn't take effect until 2013.
I must say I have to grudgingly admire the utter ruthlessness of the Democrats. I'm not sure how the "reconciliation process" works, however, I can think of a few areas where the Democrats used the filibuster to thwart important Republican objectives.
ReplyDeleteThe most important of these were the bills that were introduced to allow for more domestic oil drilling. As I remember, these bills passed the House and they had a majority of support in the Senate only to be filibustered by the Democrats and the American people have suffered terribly for this because this has strengthened the hand of our enemies and our diplomats don't have any leverage to negotiate.
I wonder if the Republicans could have used this "reconciliation process" to get something like this passed. If so, perhaps a new party who is more in tune with the needs of the average American can get something like this through.
With that said I thought the whole purpose of a filibuster was to give the minority the ability to check the majority so that the rights of the minority are not infringed upon and we are not left with mob rule. If the Democrats are going to use this reconciliation process to get this through now, this could be very bad precedent. It may be used against them some time in the future.