Thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of “wants” in this thread without a lot of “hows”. Fact is, even if you had a Senate of 52 Ted Cruz’s, Schumer wouldn’t let a clean repeal won’t get to PDT’s desk. He can easily hold most or all of his 48 rats together to stop it.
Seems to me the options are pretty binary, actually:
a) House passes a full repeal. Senate blocks it. Nothing else happens for 2 years, hope D’s get killed in ‘18 and GOP’s mandate is strengthened to pass the full repeal.
b) Some variation of this plan passes. Separate measures are either passed or held up. See if GOP can strengthen their position in ‘18 and improve the plan.
I just wish the people in Camp A would simply acknowledge the political reality instead of just saying “do it”. I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to ask where those other 8 votes are going to come from, assuming you can hold 52 Republicans together.
The Senate will block a full repeal. Harry Reid let a repeal bill get to Obama’s desk because he knew he’d veto it. Schumer isn’t an idiot and knows President Trump would sign it, so he’ll block it.
I agree with your analysis. The Democrats went on an electoral suicide mission in 2009, taking tremendous losses, but they did in fact reach the red detonation button and slammed it with their fist. Trying to put everything back together is a nightmare - as you said, by design.
You’re right. the purist don’t see to realize that they have to get people to vote for their ideas or it won’t be law regardless. I doubt they could can Collins to vote for their repeal let alone a Democrat. The confusion for me though is this. You only need 60 votes for break a filibuster not to pass the law. So, Republicans can always kill the filibuster. They won’t obviously and especially not for this but they could use Rule 19 to run out the clock on the opposition and force a vote (Rush was talking about this for Supreme Court nomination and I don’t see why they couldn’t use that for anything).