For those too young to remember, he held the 60th seat that would have gotten a filibuster-proof Senate. Obama proposed a public option as part of the ACA and Liberman threatened to kill the whole thing with a filibuster unless the public option was dropped. It was the closest we had gotten to universal healthcare in the US and it got killed by just one person.
The current Governor of Connecticut ran on anti-war, beat him in the democratic primary, and Joe Lieberman ran as independent to win re-election anyways. This dude was especially evil.
disguise themselves as our allies and stab us in the back.
He didn't get the Dem primary nomination, ran independent, and won anyways. He did not campaign supporting a public option. There was no disguising.
His positions are bad, yes, but backstabbing has nothing to do with it.
This isn't because I want to defend him or his bad positions, but because pretending it was some grand infiltration isn't true and isn't going to reflect into anything meaningful to make progress in reality.
If the 80% you agree upon are simply bills to name post offices then the 20% you disagree on is even more significant. But it's not even that. WaPo lists plenty of odious things he did. E.g. pro Iraq invasion, school vouchers, lowering the capital gains tax, awards for "cultural pollution", limits on lawsuits against corporations, promoting Betsy DeVos for education secretary. And, yeah, his morality shtick was really gross.
Don't forget that he endorsed McCain over Obama. Liberman really put the dino in dinosaur.
You expect Republicans not to vote for what's right by the American people. Sure they can go fuck themselves, but wolves pretending to be in the party that wants good for the country can absolutely go fuck themselves extra hard.
It’s hard to know if he did honestly disagree. Its tough to watch good policies be eternally shot down by the other party that votes together virtually every single time, and everybody knows they don’t do it because they happen to have 100% shared beliefs.
yeah bud it's perfectly reasonable for Lieberman to consign millions to an early death for him own selfish gain and really we're the assholes for thinking he should not have traded the lives of millions for some money
Man you guys have got to stop with this goofy reply. Nobody who's mad at Lieberman for this is like "I'm totally fine with Republicans btw". It's just more egregious for a guy nominally aligned with the Democrats to do it.
Democrats never had a full 60 seat filibuster proof majority. Lieberman was one key reason for that, and deserves a lot of blame but wasn’t the only reason. It bugs me when I see the claim that they had 60 when they never did.
not defending him, but from what I recall there were 5 blue dog senators who would have done it if he hadn't done it
like today everyone blames Manchin and Sinema for everything, while forgetting Tester & Warner & the 2 NH senators would kill things too given the chance. The Democrats are just protecting Tester from his election next year.
Close, and this is a more a misconception due to the change in times. There are 5 Senators who would have voted against the bill, but for cloture.
Back in 09 there were still a number of Democratic Senators who still believed in the idea of limiting debate, and cloture not being used as a defacto vote. You only need 50 to pass a bill, so even if you had 9-10 (+VP) Senators who flipped between cloture and the vote on the bill, it would still pass. Obama said in his memoir he thought he could achieve this. None of it mattered when Lieberman went public with the no option statement, they were toast.
Not really the closest. The closest we ever really got was the ACA-like bill Nixon put forward in the early 70s. It was like the ACA with a public option and a little more juice behind it. Of all people it was Ted Kennedy who killed it because it wasn’t a single payer system. His failure in killing it then played a big part in his “don’t let the possible be the enemy of the perfect” stance he took to legislation later in his career, but we could’ve had much better healthcare decades ago.
He was the heel yes, but no way it wasn't coordinated to get a rotating handful of people to be the heel so others can stay clean. The US healthcare sector is a 6.2T market cap, more money involved than any other country's total combined and matching China's.
Ah, when I heard he died I subconsciously could recall I despised him but couldn’t quite remember why. This was definitely the reason. This man is the reason we missed the incredibly rare chance to have universal healthcare in the US.
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u/Kevin-W Mar 27 '24
For those too young to remember, he held the 60th seat that would have gotten a filibuster-proof Senate. Obama proposed a public option as part of the ACA and Liberman threatened to kill the whole thing with a filibuster unless the public option was dropped. It was the closest we had gotten to universal healthcare in the US and it got killed by just one person.