conditional_soup@lemm.ee 6 months ago
So, I don’t think there’s a good single answer to this question.
Obama isn’t and wasn’t as progressive as he was (and sometimes is, mostly by Republicans) framed. The democrats only had a filibuster-proof majority for a few months, and even then, Joe Lieberman gummed up the world’s big time on getting the ACA through. Somebody mentioned that they wasted a lot of time trying to get bipartisan support for the ACA, and it’s true. They spent months negotiating against themselves with the republicans, whose answer was always “no”, and by the time they were done, the ACA was a shell of what it could have been. After the ACA, which I must add is basically comprised of all the non-insane (read: mostly pointless) reforms the Republicans were proposing as well as some more rational reforms, the right-wing hype machine started red-lining (as in tachometers, not the racist housing policy though I guess that could also work since they really didn’t want that black man living in that house) and you’d have thought we had an actual communist overthrow of the government on our hands. The democrats absolutely bungled the PR (the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh) and pissed off everyone outside the party and made everyone inside the party facepalm. After the supermajority disappeared, the republicans started cynically abusing the filibuster and turned the rest of Obama’s presidency into anything from a lame duck to just one (republican caused) crisis after another.
Tl;Dr a lot of the democrats aren’t progressives, and we had a lot more of the old cold-war blue dog crowd Biden is from than we do now, mixed with absolutely bunglefucking both the political strategy and PR around the ACA and not being able to get past the filibuster once the supermajority disappeared.
K1nsey6@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Roe was never considered settled law, which is why there has been numerous bills written to codify it into law. The longest standing one has been Barbara Boxers Freedom of choice act written in 2003 which kept getting shelved by Pelosi every year it was introduced, including 2009 when Obama promised he would sign it his first day in office
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of that. All of my experience around Roe was seeing republicans wanting it dealt with in the legislature/executive.
Gotta love Pelosi, just when the Democrats are in danger of not spilling the spaghetti, she reliably shows up to make a disaster of it. She’s got, like, the anti-McConnel*.
*McConnel is, imo, one of the most talented statesmen of my lifetime. It’s a goddamn shame he’s used his talents for evil. It’s a little bewildering to imagine how different a place the US could be if he’d been on the side of the people. It’s also a powerful statement of what a wreck the GOP has become that Mitch couldn’t control the MAGA/freedom caucus members anymore.