Shine A Red Dot On It

The meme from the Republicans and their enablers leading up to the passage of the healthcare bill was that the bill was going to be "rammed down the throats of the American people." Aside from their obsession with violent (not to mention kinky) imagery (and these are the same people who are hung up on gay marriage because, well, you know what goes on in those bedrooms...), they're just plain wrong. John Cole sets them, um, straight.

The bill was passed with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, as required by law and Senate rules. It was then passed in the House by majority rule and in accordance with all House Rules.

It was done so by a Democratic majority elected sixteen months ago along with a Democratic President who campaigned daily on Health Care reform, and who received the most votes in the history of American elections and won by the widest margin in decades.

The bill was crafted quite openly, after a year and a half of public debate, and the exact Senate bill that was passed in the House yesterday has been available for people to read and discuss for three entire months. This was the slowest, most open, most thoroughly discussed piece of legislation in my lifetime.

Anyone who says this was “rammed down” anyone’s throats simply does not know what they are talking about.

As commenter scav noted at Balloon Juice, "Some days, you just get the feeling they’d be baffled by the mechanical principles of a see-saw."

I think if someone had showed up with a laser pointer in the House gallery and pointed it at the wall, we could have distracted the entire Republican caucus throughout the entire debate.