Remember when we let Senator Max Baucus take the lead on health care reform?
Is it 2014 yet?
Yeah, that turned out AWESOME!
Now, with the Senate taking up a jobs bill to bang against a version already passed in the House, Ezra Klein notes that Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and his Finance Committee are trying to race out ahead and achieve a ‘bipartisan’ agreement over the jobs bill. The sickly details:
The Senate Finance Committee has released a draft (pdf) of its jobs bill, called the HIRE Act. If you’ve been following along, that might sound strange to you: Wasn’t the jobs bill coming from Byron Dorgan and Dick Durbin? Well, yes, but the Finance Committee wants control of the process, so it’s trying to muscle its way in front of them….
[...]
In other words, in order to get Republic cooperation on an $80 billion jobs bill, Democrats have promised them estate and gift tax reform, which will come to many hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the compromise that appears to have led to this package: not a better or bigger or more tax-focused jobs bill, but massive tax cuts for the rich.
via Ezra Klein – Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of It.
So, rich people get to squirrel more money away in their virtual Caribbean backyards and what not, and hopefully this means that the unemployed get some hope. I LOVE our Democratic majority.
I wish I could lament this a little more strongly, it’s just that I’m afraid that instead of a piece of landmark legislation to actually help Americans get jobs, we’ll just get more of the thin gruel we ended up with in the health care reform debate. Remember when you thought ‘health care reform’ was actually going to be some sort of nation-changing legislation, the kind we haven’t seen since LBJ’s Great Society? Instead, we got a bundle of regulatory reforms that would take years to kick in, and ultimately one in the Senate that didn’t even include any kind of recognizable government-backed public option.
I fear it will also be this way with whatever jobs bill we find our Senate considering – something so watered down by phony ‘bipartisanship’ and with so many giveaways for individual Senatorial provinces that you won’t cry over it failing to pass.
But if Democrats want to hold onto their majority in the Senate, which I actually think they could do, they’d benefit from a little more partisanship, and not less. Ezra encourages Democrats to pass a jobs bill via reconciliation so all they need is a simple majority. But I say go the other way. Let the Republicans filibuster the bill. Let them explain why their strong partisan principles of choking off Democratic efforts to govern are more important than helping Americans dig their way out of the blizzard brought on by months of sluggish growth, unemployment, and what now appears to be a jobless recovery.
As I’ve long argued, parties that have to pull stunts like forcing a reading the whole text of the bill and filibustering are parties that are losing the war of the ideas. The vote to send Scott Brown to Washington and confirm to us that the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist end the Democratic super-majority had more to do with voters not liking how things were being done in Washington than it had to do with what Democrats were doing in the Senate. If Democrats could actually govern based on their ideas, the public would not be so skeptical of their incumbency and race to the polls in November to restore a Republican majority that is as lacking in ideas other than cutting taxes and spending as they were in the past 15 years.
But if all we’re getting is Max Baucus sculpting give aways to the GOP with no take backs on the Democratic side, what difference does it make?
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Max baucus is a Socialist in step with Barack Obama and the other socialists who have lied to the American people to take office but now go against the will of the people.
Here in Montana, Baucus trys to act like he is a true Montanan. Yet a true Montanan would never vote to ruin the inherent freedom of the individual. By not standing up to Obama and the Marxist agenda, Max Baucus is killing small business and the future of our children.
How is he killing our future?
THE MAX BAUCUS HEALTHCARE PORTA-POTTY BILL, festering away with disease and stink and bile, Baucus’ virulent tax bacteria waiting to crawl out of his healthcare Porta-Potty sewer hole, up into our most vulnerable parts.
MAX BAUCUS and fellow Montana Socialist JON TESTER are screwing the voters over with their healthcare fiasco, and now the voters are supposed to forget all about their healthcare vote against Montana kids and focus on other business, like we are too stupid to see Baucus’ real agenda, like we will divert our attention from the real problem—Max Baucus—and this will save his sold-out soul from defeat in the next election.
Yeah, MAX, you sold out our kids, and Montanans are so stupid they will now divert their senses from the stinking healthcare Porta-Potty you are tipping over in the laps of our children’s future.
Metaphorically, it is as though you are sticking a hunting knife in our backs and telling us to ignore it and go back to work, like we won’t feel anything is wrong as you drain our blood away.
You think you can get reelected in the next election?
Like we are supposed to forget about the fatal stab you are giving our children’s future?
MAX SOCIALIST BAUCUS, WE ARE GOING TO VOTE YOU OUT OF OFFICE.
We are going to put YOU and the idiots who work for you out of work and send you straight to the unemployment lines where you are sending our children. We are going to take YOUR PAYCHECKS away because we don’t want to give you our tax money to stab us in the back and dump your bait and switch bile on our kids anymore.
We’ll look the other way and forget about the Porta-Potty mess you are dumping all over us, the knife you are sticking in our backs. You bet.
Max the Socialist, you are taking our money NOW to pay a debt for things you stole long ago. You want my kids’ money to fund a system that does not work. This is the old way of business in Washington, but when it comes to transforming our country into your socialist utopia, this old way does not work.
You are reforming nothing with your “healthcare reform.” You are stealing our money to pay for your crap legislation. You aren’t from Montana. You sold us out. You are big sky garbage.
We are on to you and we will not forget.
You are Big Sky Scum