I'm seeing a lot of partisanship on this thread. Us bickering over who will benefit from others being out of work seems pretty out of touch to me. Don't you agree it's better for us to find common ground? What's even worse is that neither side is asking for much.
Jesus, what are you, CNN? This false equivalency nonsense is the worst thing about the
shutdown slimdownŠ.
Here's
Oakvale's Brief History of The Attempts To Repeal Obamacare, presented free of charge as a public service.
1. The administration begins to work on a centrist healthcare reform law large built on idea endorsed by the Heritage Foundation and Newt Gingrich. Republicans immediately decide this is Marxism and rednecks across the nation petition their representatives to keep the government out of their socialised healthcare.
2. After a contentious debate and much pandering from coward right-wing Democrats, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare passes the House and the Senate and is signed into law by the President.
3. Republican crybabies immediately begin futile efforts to repeal the law by holding a bunch of meaningless votes to do so.
4. The Republican Party takes the House, but fails to take the Senate let alone come anywhere close to a veto-proof majority. Aware that there remains no chance that the President will sign a bill repealing the most significant social policy accomplishment in a generation the Republican House nonetheless decides that the Bill is unconstitutional and attempts to repeal it anyway.
5. As Republicans wait for vindication of their argument that Obamacare is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of the United States, the arbiter of how the term "constitutional" is legitimately applied, rules, led by George W. Bush appointee John Roberts, that the central foundation of the bill, the individual mandate, is, in fact constitutional. Legal scholar Rand Paul response "just because some people on the Supreme Court decide something is constitutional doesn't make it so". The Republican Party wets itself
en masse and continues trying to repeal the law.
6. President Obama handily defeats Republican candidate Mitt "Mittens" Romney to be comfortably re-elected to a second term as President. Romney spent much of the campaign vowing to repeal Obamacare and the law was a major issue in the election. Republicans lose seats in both Houses of Congress to the pro-Obamacare Democratic Party.
7. Emboldened by the widespread rejection of their agenda, Republicans courageously fight to save America once again by voting to repeal Obamacare another eighty thousand times. The odds of this happening are even lower than before given the increased Democratic Senate majority and the fact that the namesake of the bill will be in office until 2017.
8. As the bizarre technicality known as the "debt ceiling" approaches, the Republicans, riding on a wave of popular support in their own rural and suburban hellhole districts, decide the most justifiable course of action is to hold the global economy to ransom by throwing a massive tantrum, shutting down the government, and threatening to cause a second Great Depression unless the Democratic Party (winners, national popular vote, Congressional elections, 2012) and President Barack Obama (winner, national popular and electoral vote, Presidential election, 2012) join in their unhinged reactionary circlejerk and repeal a decidedly centrist healthcare law. Economic terrorism is the order of the day as Republicans adopt a posture of moral outrage at the idea that Obama should refuse to negotiate with these psychopaths.
WHY CAN'T WE FIND SOME COMMON GROUND? BOTH SIDES ARE EQUALLY TO BLAME.
