Reply #55: Good, there's still hope. [View All]

[backscatter712]

The cool thing is that if the Democrats screw their gonads on and do their jobs, they can resurrect the public option. They can pass the Senate bill, and set up the budget-reconciliation sidecar bill which has the House-Senate agreements negotiated before the Choakley fiasco. What's beautiful is that adding a public option to the sidecar would almost certainly be Byrd-Rule compliant - starting the public option requires spending of money, thus affecting budgets and deficits, and the effect of the public option on the health insurance market, and by extension, the cost of Medicare, would affect the deficit.

And it would still only require 51 votes! We can tell not only Brown and the Rethugs, but Lieberman, Nelson and the other DINOs to suck it!

If the Democrats screwed on their gonads and did this, they'd be fucking heroes. Passing a bill with a public option would definitely help reverse the crashing poll numbers, and restore some of the enthusiasm of the base.