Jophiel wrote:
My heart breaks. Don't get me wrong, I recognize that they gave plenty of sound bites and talking points. Lots of "Tort reform would save us!" and crap like that. Stuff that absolutely failed to address coverage and really boiled down to "Free market!" And I understand that you no doubt bought into that and said "Yup, look at all those alternatives!". Did they actually cobble together an alternative proposal? Not really. Did they put together an alternative proposal that would hit the points the ACA was trying to accomplish? Not at all.
Um... What criteria are you using though? Because if "putting together an alternative proposal" requires pushing some bill through a committee, and getting it put out for a vote, then you are correct in that they didn't do that. But they didn't do that because they were the minority party and *couldn't* do that. The party in power doesn't just have a voting advantage in that house of Congress. They also get to decide what gets put on the schedules. That means every committee and floor vote. Thus, all the majority party has to do is not take up a proposal and it doesn't exist. It wont appear on any record, it'll never get voted on, and the majority party can then pretend that the minority party never presented an alternative proposal.
Which is exactly what happened.
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But that's really pretty irrelevant anyway. The GOP was the minority party. Stomping their feet and huffing and giving the occasional talking point about insurance across state lines wasn't any serious attempt at making sure responsible legislation passed.
Again, what constitutes a "serious attempt"? If the majority party refuses to schedule any of the minority party's proposals, even in committee, then they don't exist. The GOP can be as serious as they want. They can write proposal after proposal. But if those in the other party refuse to do anything with them, then they will never go anywhere.
The only option the minority party has is to publish these ideas outside congress. So you'll see their proposals appear in periodicals and published by advocacy groups aligned with that party (like say Heritage in this case). But, of course, you dismiss all the stuff that appeared there are "not being serious". Your cart is leading your horse.
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The GOP was 100% committed to their "Make this Obama's Waterloo" strategy.
Sigh. Stop quoting one source over and over. That's not it at all. The GOP opposed the ideas that the Obama administration and the Dems wanted. Pure and simple. Whether that becomes the political equivalent of a Waterloo is a completely separate issue.
You don't seriously believe that the only reason the GOP opposed Obamacare was because they wanted to hurt Obama? That's insane! The GOP has consistently opposed socialized medicine for like the last 4 or 5 decades. They opposed it in the 70s. They opposed it in the 80s. They opposed it in the 90s. And they opposed it in the 2000s. Why on earth would you suddenly think that this has nothing to do with principle and must just be some political maneuver or something? I'll say it again: That's insane.
Something they weren't trying to do failed? Seriously? Yes, they failed to prevent the Dems from passing a law that they GOP opposed. That was (and is) a failure. But the idea that they only opposed it for political reasons is nutty as hell.
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And now there's a law that you can cry over and pout and try and say "I told you so!" but one thing that you can't say is that the GOP acted responsibly or made any actual effort to be part of the process.
The fact that the law sucks and wont work isn't the GOP's fault though. It's an inherent component of the law your guys passed. Maybe if more people had listened to the GOP we would not have a health care law that is broken. I guess what I find so bizarre is that the GOP opposed a law that they clearly have a long history being ideologically opposed to. Yet, despite that, you insist that they opposed it purely for political reasons. And then, when the law is passed and turns out to be a disaster, you blame the GOP for making the law they opposed not work? Really? Maybe it was just a bad idea in the first place? Can't you acknowledge even the possibility that maybe the GOP was just plain right to oppose this?
And maybe, just maybe, if the Dems hadn't been so insistent on their mandates and more willing to work with the GOP on an actual bipartisan health care reform, we could have come up with something that both parties could agree on and that would actually have worked? I know, shocking idea! And you know what? It wasn't the GOP who prevented that from happening. It was the Dems. They refused to listen to any GOP proposals, and insisted on pushing a law that included components that they knew were absolute deal breakers for the GOP. The fault is the Dems all the way around.