{"id":2366,"date":"2009-07-15T23:21:47","date_gmt":"2009-07-15T23:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2366"},"modified":"2009-07-15T23:21:47","modified_gmt":"2009-07-15T23:21:47","slug":"deliberative_bo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2366","title":{"rendered":"Deliberative Body"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Health care reform reached a significant milestone today when the <a href=\"http:\/\/thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/07\/15\/senate-committee-approves-health-care-bill\/\">Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a bill<\/a> that includes a universal mandate for everyone to be insured, a strong public plan, and government subsidies to assist families with modest incomes to purchase coverage. While this is an important step, I fear that the Senate is currently Public Enemy #1 when it comes to meaningful health care reform. Ryan Powers writes a forceful post illustrating the <a href=\"http:\/\/ryanpowers.net\/archives\/2009\/7\/15\/at_the_recommendation_of_my\/\">Senate&#8217;s long history of obstructing progressive legislation<\/a>. The Senate operates in a weird parallel universe where majority rule isn&#8217;t good enough. Instead, a super-duper majority of 60 senators is needed to pass most major legislation. Why? Because tradition demands it. Even though the Constitution says nothing about super-duper majorities, the Senate prefers to observe decorum rather than actually, you know, pass legislation. <\/p>\n<p>For health care reform to attract 60 votes, it will have to be watered down to appease so-called moderates who can&#8217;t quite bring themselves to confront the true extent of our existing system&#8217;s fucked-upness. I&#8217;m starting to think that real reform can only be accomplished through the reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority. And the Obama administration seems to be <a href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/2009\/07\/15\/axelrod-rahm-health-care\/\">similarly inclined<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Health care reform reached a significant milestone today when the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a bill that includes a universal mandate for everyone to be insured, a strong public plan, and government subsidies to assist families with modest incomes to purchase coverage. While this is an important step, I fear that <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2366' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-Ca","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}