So, ah, who recruited him to run?

"... and thus the effective ability to govern."

Doesn't matter how big a majority you have in the House. Senators representing 20 out of the 50 states, even the smallest, most unpopulated states in the country, can stop anything.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to live in a democracy.

This is the beginning of a sea change in American politics. We are re-aligning to the center-right philosophy and policies that have served us so well for three hundred years.

I live in his district (temporarily). It was hardly a novelty for AL-05 to be represented by a Democrat. Bud Cramer held the seat from 1991 until Griffith succeeded him in 2008.

But I have to agree that this won't change much because Griffith was determined to be on the wrong side of issues anyway. Hopefully they'll primary him and make him feel silly.

I think that this is what many of the people complaining about the behavior of Nelson, Lincoln, Landrieu, Bayh, etc. forget....you don't get to 60 votes in the Senate and 250+ in the House unless you have a very big tent that contains a wide variety of Democrats.

After all, the Democrats have roughly 59% of the seats in Congress (313 out of 535), despite having nowhere near 59% support nationwide.

If we can keep 240+ seats in the House in 2010 it'll be a good showing.

I think that this is what many of the people complaining about the behavior of Nelson, Lincoln, Landrieu, Bayh, etc. forget....you don't get to 60 votes in the Senate and 250+ in the House unless you have a very big tent that contains a wide variety of Democrats.

But in the long run that gets you only incoherence and failure to govern effectively. Achieving a large but incoherent majority is like a drug, and there's always a major hangover after the high wears off. The Republicans have long been able to accomplish much more of their agenda with slenderer but more disciplined majorities, and the alternation of such periods with feckless Dem majorities has simply resulted in continual ratcheting of our politics to the right. It's time to rethink this failed model.

but I'm sure we'll be able to "improve" the HCR disaster with those much smaller majorities or minorities. At least that's what all the DNC shills in the media keep telling us.
Who's the DINO again? Does it matter?

Al, you really need to change your name to AI; it fits your Eliza-style comments so much better.

Allan, it will certainly be easier to improve HCR than to start over from scratch and pass something better.

The only way progressives arguing against HCR make sense is when they honestly believe that the current bill is worse than the status quo. I can respect that argument, but disagree with it and would refer you to editorials from the weekend by Vicki Kennedy and Paul Krugman among others.

However, the argument that passing a weak bill will somehow make it less likely to get something stronger is wrong both on the merits and morally. If we get nothing passed after a bruising 10 month battle, and subsequently lose seats in Congress (whether due to this failure or just to the natural ebb and flow of Congressional majorities), then it will be years before HCR is addressed again and the current bill will be the default that gets bargained done to even less.

The only way to argue otherwise is to claim that we are in a crisis that will get even worse and will trigger a groundswell of support to do something more ambitious. That hasn't happened after previous attempts to pass universal health care, and it certainly didn't work as a general progressive strategy in 2000. Thanks in part to Nader (and yes, there are several things that each individually could be pointed to to say "this cost Gore the election", but shared responsibility is not necessarily lessened responsibility), we got 8 years of Bush/Cheney. Even if that was a price worth paying, the people who originally claimed it would work out in the long run don't seem to happy with what we are accomplishing now with the Obama Presidency and Democratic Congress that we got on the rebound. So the question becomes just how much worse are you prepared for things to get and how much suffering has to happen in the meantime in order to get the "real" progressive revolution you are waiting for?

These districts are only 'reliably conservative' because they're drawn that way. An honest reevaluation of districts is in order the nation over.

However, the argument that passing a weak bill will somehow make it less likely to get something stronger is wrong both on the merits and morally.

Stuff and nonsense. About that point Charlie Pierce is far wiser, and more realistic, than you.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/altercation/508018/slacker_sunday

My new favorite futile argument for passing the current POS is that, in our politics, simply by passing the aforementioned POS, we forever will have established, banners aloft, the notion that healthcare is a right or, at least, an affirmative obligation of the national government. As a result, we will be freer to move forward as the years go by. This is a fine argument, provided that you were cryogenically frozen in 1958. Let me explain to everyone holding this particular view what is going to happen. The POS is going to pass. The Republicans are going to oppose it and run against it. The Democrats are going to look ridiculous for a year defending it, and the Democrats who most opposed it are going to look the most ridiculous, because it is going to be politically impossible for a Democrat to run against this bill. The prevailing media narrative will prevent it. Millions more American will have health insurance, but millions of Americans will be forced by law to fork over their money, during a grisly recession, to the greediest and least popular industry the country has seen since the railroads were running amok in the 1890's. These people will go broke a little more slowly, depending on how sick they get. The industry will jack up its rates until we all have to put in new attics. The subsidies will fail to keep up. And then the industry will lie about doing any of it, and the White House will send out a sternly worded letter. The industry will be stopped by the new "consumer protections" approximately as effectively as a butterfly stops a freight train. By the end of 2009[sic- I think he meant 2010], these "reforms" will be thoroughly despised by a healthy portion of the electorate. The Republicans will then use the weaknesses of the reforms to assume control of the Congress, whereupon they will leave the mandates in place, gut the regulations, and laugh their way to the bank doing it. And that is what's going to happen.

Where does this optimism come from? Do the people pushing this argument honestly believe that, once this bill passes, there will be a general political consensus that we are all on the right track together and must continue to move forward to improve a system in which we all are now personally invested? Exactly what United States government have these people been watching for the past three decades, in which the notion of "government" as a political commonwealth has been spat upon and ignored? Fix it later? We can't bring ourselves to spend money to fix roads and bridges that are falling into rivers, let alone improve what has become the most contentious--and arguably, the most successfully lied about--issue of domestic policy of the past two decades. This bill is going to suck a little until the rest of us aren't watching that closely, and then the people who hate the whole notion of reforming the "system" of health-care are going to work to make it suck a lot. Bob Cesca is a smart guy, but if he thinks we're going to add a public option before 2013, I wish he'd tell me where he buys his mushrooms. (So we "mobilize around" the idea. Who's even going to listen, let alone act on it? The White House? The Democrats? Please.) Ezra Klein has forgotten more about this debate than I'll ever know, but if he and Paul Starr believe this FANTASY, then they need to get out more.

Steve, all of those disastrous predictions are based on the assumption (made without detailing the specific elements of the current bill that supports the assumption) that the final HCR bill is an unmitigated disaster.

Convince us of that:

-- discuss why the plan to let some plans compete within a national exchange (in addition to the state-by-state exchanges most will be limited to) will not work. Keeping in mind that this provision puts the Office of Personell Management in charge of determing which plans qualify and requires that AT LEAST one of the plans offered must be from a non-profit.

-- discuss why the rule mandating a minimum % of premiums goto health care expenses and quality of care campaigns will not limit excess profits and overhead.

-- discuss why, specifically, the limitations on recision, annual and lifetime coverage limits, and pre-existing condition exclusions will be inadequate. Keeping in mind that all of these elements are due to go into effect in 2010 or 2011.

-- actually address, rather than dismissing as hopelessly naive, all of the other very real arguments being made by Klein, Krugman, Harkin, various Kennedys and other prominent progressive supporters of a more comprehensive HCR bill as to why the current bill, however imperfect, is a significant and meaningful improvement on the status quo.

Until you have succeeded in that debate, don't even start on the one about whether killing this bill will lead to something better at some indefinite time down the road. And if you can't win that battle, then you sure as hell better stop trashing this bill once it has passed. Because convincing the public it was a good move that can be made better rather than a disaster waiting to happen is your best chance at getting those improvements. Trashing the current Democratic majority as a bunch of DINO's who sold out progressives isn't going to get you anything but more Republican officeholders who will be happy to turn all your doomsaying into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Parker Griffith: right-wing-reactionary. And yet more towards the centre of the caucus, according to VoteView, than netroots heroes Periello, Murphy, and Kratovil.

The guy is conservative, no doubt about it, but we need conservative districts, and we need guys like him -- this kind of crowing about 'we didn't want you in our stupid treehouse anyway' is incredibly damaging, and it's EXACTLY the reason why the Republicans are such an unelectable rump. We made fun of RedState when they cheered when Arlen Specter defected; sure, it gave us another vote in the Senate, but this is just the kind of move which creates a political climate for people like Nelson, Lincoln and Landrieu to think seriously about crossing the aisle.

Go back and reread your optimists, tansttafl. All of them admit (as any honest person must) the shakiness of the actual bill's merits, and depend heavily on the idea that this bill can serve as a base for incremental improvements in the reasonably near future. We pessimists counter that this hope flies in the face of several decades of actual political experience (as eloquently outlined by Pierce). In the next few years, starting with a bang in 2010, we'll find out who's right, because I have no doubt that this thing is now unstoppable.

BTW the Dem majority are not exactly DINOS, they're simply whores for corporate money. That's the route Rahm and his fellow travelers decided to follow in order to match or beat the Republicans at their own fundraising game, and any fair-minded person must allow that they've executed that strategy very adeptly. How electorally successful this strategy will be in the long run, again remains to be seen.

No Steve, I think you will find that the "optimists" as you call them argue that if you had to choose between this bill as it is now (without counting on it being improved and without expecting it to be gutted by Republicans) versus doing nothing at all for at least several years, then this bill as it is right now is a good thing.

Meanwhile, having a strong contingent continuing to campaign for something stronger is useful. Having a few prominent progressives be unhappy enough to be ready to trash the whole thing may even be what's needed to keep Nelson and Lieberman from deciding they gave away too much after all and reversing themselves at the last moment. But unless something changes, the latest incarnation of HCR is going to be enacted very soon. And if you and the other purists keep trashing it and the Democratic congress that passed it once that happens -- if you stay home during the midterms, if you actively work to defeat any but the most right-wing of the Democrats -- then you will be guaranteeing that all of your dire predictions come true by increasing the representation of those who are opposed to ALL reform and proving to those who supported HCR that there is no benefit to working for it.

To clarify, when I said "...if you actively work to defeat any but the most right-wing of the Democrats...", I wasn't suggesting you would spare Conservative Democracts and target the more liberal ones.

I meant that some Senators like Lieberman and Nelson for certain and Landrieu and Lincoln possibly are so opposed to doing anything more than the current bill that trying to replace them with someone more progressive is worthwhile even if it ultimately leads to Republicans taking one or more of those seats. The same is undoubtedly true in the House but I haven't been following that as closely.

Btw, on the original topic and in response to Black Mage, there is a point where a Democratic congressman can oppose us on so many issues that we really are just as well of without them. Who cares if Griffith frequently votes with the Dems on a raft of non-controversial measures? This year, he voted with the Republicans on every one of the largest measures where passage was in doubt. And what does it say about how broken our system is if having switched parties, he suddenly becomes a reliable party-line voter for the Republicans when he never was for the Democrats? And if he continues to "vote his conscience" on an issue-by-issue basis, what do we lose by his change of party given the party balance in the House is not close to even?

Note to Al:
Famous Liberals:
Founding Fathers,
Abraham Lincoln.

So, what does is really matter if you have a "democrat" that votes republican. It matters here...perception. If you have a bunch of Heath Shulers voting against everything liberals stand for all you do is create confusion.

And to boot, why on earth would I support such a Rep as Shuler, he never votes for anything, and I do mean anything, I stand for. So tell me what's the point of voting for him? Or for having him in the "caucus", all he does is help defeat anything a true liberal stands for. The old Kos meme of voting in more democrats until we can get better democrats is a crock of shiat. All you're doing is empowering bad, and I do mean BAD democrats that will be hard as heck to defeat once we're down the road.

Here's what you get by voting in consevative dems, a piece of crap Health Care bill that will not only hurt the very people your party says it represents, it will also get your party a minority in 2011, a minority where a lot of those same "dems" are still in your "caucus".

Good Luck.

I’ve seen progression in every post. Your newer posts are simply wonderful compared to your posts in the past. Keep up the good work!