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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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I agree about "fuck em", let's get out with the old and in with the new.
But what majorities are you talking about? I keep seeing this repeated all over the internet- the sentiment that Democrats get nothing done when they have control. The problem is that I'm 33 years old and the Dems have only had control of the federal government for a few months of my life, and that's when they passed the ACA. I can't really make a judgement on what the Dems do when they're in power because they largely have not been.
So the best thing the Democrats could do when they had a super majority was pass the Republican healthcare plan? And you don't see why that's a problem?
Technically it was a more conservative version of the Republican healthcare plan...
But that comment also incredibly misrepresents how long Dems have held dual majorities, which is a much bigger issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Congresses
Yes. Sadly, it was RomneyCare, and the very first thing VP Biden did in negotiations was throw out the public option as a pre-concession to republicans. They hadn’t even begun debating the bill yet.
Biden was the VP at that point but yeah fuck that shit
Oops, fixed, ty
Who said anything about dual majorities?
It was literally based on Mitt Romney's healthcare bill in Massachusetts. Unless you think the guy that ran on the Republican ticket AGAINST Obama wasn't a Republican.
Romney was indeed a Republican, but a moderate one. The Church of Latter Day Saints has always been a weird outlier in American politics, and as a Mormon Romney largely follows that tradition. Utah itself is a great reminder that the trends Americans see with the two-party system, where every issue is a binary choice with the GOP or DNC each picking an option, the reality on the ground is more complicated.
It's also worth looking to how Romney was the first senator in US history to vote to impeach his own party's president. He did it again the 2nd time Trump was impeached too, along with a handful of others.
That's not to say that I like Romney at all, or even that I like the ACA or even that I like the Democrats.But Romney is perhaps the furthest left Republican and created that initial bill with the intention of being a bipartisan compromise. He's far closer to Neoliberal than Nazi. And while it was the foundation, his bill was NOT the final bill that passed into law. The bill that did pass saw 100% of Republican senators vote against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with 1 meaningless Republican vote. To say it was a Republican bill is simply historically inaccurate.
The criticism is valid but antiquated. It was Romney's healthcare framework for Massachusetts, and Obama (in typical fashion) led with a compromise to attempt to avoid a fight with conservatives and conservative democrats. By agreeing to private insurance mandates and not even fighting for a viable public option, I agree that Obama really missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
The reason why it doesn't make sense now to level the criticism that it's a "Republican healthcare plan" is that we've shifted several Overton windows to the right since then. A "Republican healthcare plan" in 2025 is an uninsured ER visit, where they are allowed to turn you away; you die in the street, after which your surviving family is billed for the corpse cleanup.
That compromise with a group that had been screeching about hiw they won't work with you for the previous 15 years is exactly how we got to where we are today.
Yes, for sure. While everyone else was in realpolitik mode, it seemed clear to me you don't start a negotiation with a bad faith opponent by ceding your strongest position.
Obama governed as a centrist, and while I agree he probably escaped unscathed without any long-term ill will because of it, he squandered a ton of opportunities. Oh, and we got Trump as a reaction to the GOP's boogeyman propaganda anyway.
Calling another user a Russian bot is a civility violation so your comment is removed.
But further, the reason Obamacare is often called "a Republican plan" is two-fold:
First, there's not a lot of daylight between Obamacare and what Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts as "Romneycare". Democrats would like to believe otherwise, Republicans would like to pretend otherwise, but there it is:
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/romneycare-vs-obamacare-key-similarities-differences/
"you guys had a proven model that we built the Affordable Care Act on this template of proven, bipartisan success. Your law was the model for the nation’s law.” - Barack Obama.
Second, unlike universal health care, Obamacare forced people into the clutches of the for profit health care system when, ideally, it should have eliminated it. Forcing people to give money to companies is a Republican bulwark, not a Democratic one.
My apologies if a crosses a line with the comment, but calling the ACA Republican is demonstrably and factually false and, in my opinion, actively spreading disinformation.
The bill passed the Senate 60-39, with 1 abstaining. All 39 Republicans Senators voted against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with only 1 Republican vote.
If you want to say it wasn't enough, that's completely fair and I would agree. If you want to say the Democratic Party, both back then and today, is dominated by Neoliberal interests and suppresses Progressives or Socialists or whoever else then I would also agree. But none of that was the conversation- the bill that passed was demonstrably not Republican.
No, I'm saying that Barack Obama, the architect of the plan, straight up told everyone he based it on Mitt Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts.
That's what people mean when they say "Republican Plan". It's a copy pasta from Mitt "Corporations are people, my friend" Romney.
Then why didn't Republicans vote for it?
And not just votes. Republican Attorneys General across the country tried to get it overturned in the courts. The House and Senate Minority Leaders have quotes strongly against it. Romney himself did not hold any office at the time the ACA was passed, but was preparing for his next presidential campaign. He described it as "an unconscionable abuse of power...the act should be repealed".
If you look more closely at the Massachusetts state government in 2006 when Romney was governor and passed "Romneycare", you'll find that the state Senate was dominated by Democrats 34-6, while the state House was dominated by Democrats 139-20-1. There's a much, much stronger case that Romneycare in Massachusetts was a Democratic piece of legislation than there is that the ACA was Republican.
The Republicans had plenty of control of the federal government before Obama, and their plan of "leaving Americans with nothing* was already in place. That's what the Republicans voted for in 2010 by voting against the ACA.
Because Obama proposed it, they opposed anything with Obamas involvement.
It was absolutely a Republican bill. The Democrats tried to implement universal healthcare in 93 but the Gingrich controlled House shut it down. If Obama and said he wanted to offer a tax break to first time gun owners, the Republicans and Fox News would have called it a communist plot to create a Democrat controlled militia. The Republicans are only ever interested in obstruction
you owe it yourself to read up on american political history and; if you did; you would learn that every time they've had control of all 3 branches of government; they've squandered it by letting a one or 2 democrats derail all of their plans, meanwhile republicans steamroll over their own dissenters every time they're in control.
you'd start to see that this pattern keeps happening again and again.
What times are these?
As I said, they have only had control for 4 months in my lifetime. Before that you need to go back to 1961-1969 with Kennedy and Johnson. I would actually need to do more research to find out whether they had a Supermajority or not, but it's not even worth looking up because going that far back in time shifts the politics of the parties significantly and is not very relevant to today. The Democratic Party still has plenty of Southern Conservatives all the way into the Carter years.
So I would love to know what pattern you are seeing.
democrats had full control from 1993–1995, 2009–2011, 2021–2023 and majority control from 2011-2015 & 2023-2024. in other words: 12 years of complete or majority control out of the last 33 years.
every single time their agenda was thwarted by one or two lone dissenters within their caucuses; where republicans completely steamrolled over their own dissenters.
You should looked up how Congress works. They need a Supermajority to pass most legislation, and the Dems only had that for about 4 months from 2009-2010. The last time they had that control was under Kennedy/Johnson in the 60's.
I think they're including technical majorities that failed to effect meaningful change because of DINO shitbags like Manchin and Sinema.
Even without those DINOs they still didn't have a Supermajority. Honestly I think most people just don't understand the difference between a majority and Supermajority and mistakenly believe 50 is enough in the Senate.
have you ever wondered why republicans don't need a super-majorities or why dems give a rats ass about dino where republicans dont every-single-time?
is that not the definition of a rigged game?
What?
We literally had it 2021-2023...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Congresses
And from 07 to 11....
What are you talk.ing about "a few months"?
They had control of the Presidency and the House of Representatives. I never said they didn't have that- I said they didn't have control of the Federal Government.
The Senate was tenuous. Just having 50 Dem Senators (well, that's not true either because you need to include Independents to get to 50) isn't good enough- you need 60 votes to have a filibuster-ptoof majority. The Dems just barely scraped that together in 2009, complicated in part by Ted Kennedy's seizure and eventual death and Al Franken delayed in getting seated due to recounts. They only had 60 votes (still including Independents) from September 24th 2009 - February 4th, 2010. 4 months of controlling the federal government.
That is why when the 2008 financial crisis happened and the Dems wanted to pas a stimulus package in 2009, they had to get Snowe, Collins, and Spectre (who would leater switch parties to get them to 60) from the Republican side in order to get that passed.
They absolutely did not have control of the Supreme Court at any point in the Biden administration and the Republican SCOTUS shut down a lot of what the Biden administration tried to do. I remember checking every day for months to see how they would rule on Student Loan forgiveness, for example.
This is why they have the perception of being powerless- because they've pretty much never had the power. The Republicans love people who say the Democrats are useless. They love saying Biden didn't do what he promised when he DID and the GOP-dominated Supreme Court reversed it. They love being able to stall Democrat legislation and blaming a Democrat president. Everything the Dems have done outside of those 4 months have required careful compromises and negotiation with the GOP to pass.
They also had 50 D senators and Harris as the tiebreaker...
They had the whole federal government for two years but didn't get shit done because suddenly the guy who campaigned on being a literal "senate whisper" who said he could get R votes wasn't able to get every D vote.
If you can't understand 2021-2023, stop trying to cover earlier too.
You're skipping the whole "fillibuster" thing. You need 60 to even have a vote on a lot of issues.
The filibuster that the Democrats always refuse to abolish. The fact that the filibuster still exists in 2025 is proof that they don't care about Americans.
We don't have a parliamentary system where a party can kick out an elected member for not supporting the party's agenda and replace them with someone else. Each member is individually elected to represent their state or district. For better or for worse, they get to decide what is best for their constituents and their constituents get to respond in the next election.
Joe Manchin was the major impediment in 2021-2023. He mostly supported the party's agenda but had some sticking points. He had to be onboard with whatever passed given the razor thin majority.
I saw all these screeds about how he should be kicked out of the party, but the objective reality is there is very little you can do to pressure a centrist Democrat from a state that voted for Trump by 50 points. The only option available was to placate him and come to a compromise (which he ultimately agreed to for major climate change reduction investment).
The reality is that the Democratic Party is not monolithic, it has some centrists who don't support some of the more ambitious goals of the party. If you want bigger action, you have to have a bigger majority. Slim majorities give small wings of the party outsized influence on policy.
That doesn't mean no pressure can be applied, if it does then Biden is a liar and ignorant of how our system works... Why didn't you speak up when he kept claiming he could apply pressure to get Republican votes? But regardless of if it could have worked, Biden refused to try public pressure
The fact that we can't kick them out of the party is why the new DNC is advocating to primary them out.