CA: Deal Reached to Raise Minimum Wage to $15/hour

[Landslide Lyndon]

Jerry Brown is a progressive hero.
But just for the History, what the hell was he thinking back in 1992 when he advocated a flat tax?

[Landslide Lyndon]

As I have detailed on other threads, Obamacare is not a counterexample. There were already bipartisan bills for universal coverage in 2009, but rewarding election year supporters got in their way. Even if it was, my point stands and a proposal that was significantly different than the discussions then underway was going to need more time to move conservatives even as Obamacare evolved further from the form in which it was presented in early 2009. It didn't take the time to converge with other proposals then extant. It was rushed to beat a Senate filibuster.

Yeah, it was "rushed" after "only" 6 months of deliberations where Democrats constantly watered down the bill only for the Republicans to move even further the goalposts.
Not to mention that Mike Enzi later admitted that they were negotiating in bad faith and never intended to support the bill, no matter how many concessions they extracted.
That's some nice revisionist bullcrap you got there.

[Landslide Lyndon]

Any watering down and concessions made after the summer 2009 recess had nothing to do with Pub demands. Those were to respond to demands from reluctant Dems. I was referring to negotiations based on other bills like Wyden-Bennett which took place before the summer of 2009. The summer recess was the watershed when the members went back to districts and got an earful from opponents at town halls. Yes, that hardened Pub opposition and pretty much ended debate along the lines being drafted for that year. I stand by my claims that by keeping the employer mandate in the bill (the part most detested by the Chamber of Commerce and ironically the part that most kept the plan from being universal coverage) the Dems cut off their best chance to rebuild support across the aisle at a later date.

I also stand by my timeline and the Dems strategy in the Senate to pass Obamacare. After the death of Kennedy in Aug 2009 the Senate Dems knew the clock was ticking. Rather than slowing down and trying to craft a truly bipartisan bill as the furor from the summer wore off, they opted to accelerate and go for a cloture vote on strict party lines in the same year. That succeeded on Dec 23, 2009 after making changes to get the last couple of Dems on board. The election of Scott Brown the following month ended the filibuster-proof majority.

Whatever makes you sleep at night dude. Apparently in your alternate reality the scorched earth opposition to Obama didn't start from day 1 of his presidency.

And of course proposing what is essentialy Romneycare wasn't bipartisan enough. Apparently the Democrats should have adopted the Republican alternative. There isn't one of course even today, 7 years later, but who cares?

[Landslide Lyndon]

To tie my point about Obamacare back to the thread, we need to keep in mind that just because an action at the state level is bipartisan, it doesn't mean that Congress will treat it as such. Congress has its own dynamics independent of the states. Obamacare may have been derived from Romneycare, but bipartisan groups in Congress had been working in other directions prior to the 2008 election. Any MA bipartisanship on that issue was not going to translate to DC. Similarly in 2014 MI passed a bipartisan effort to increase the minimum wage. That does not automatically mean a similar bill would be bipartisan in DC. It only becomes bipartisan if the sponsor has identified a bipartisan group in Congress that wants to work along those lines.

Either you are naive of you are pretty good at pretending to be. The problem for Republicans wasn't the policy but the politics. Obama himself was eager to have them on board, the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies begged them to take part in the writing of the bill.
But they determined even before Obama was sworn in that they will give him no aid or comfort whatsoever. Their goal as Mitch McConnell proudly said was to make Obama a one-term president and denying him any kind of legislative victory was instrumental to their plan.

If you really think that Democrats backing off on mandate would suddenly make Republicans vote for Obamacare then you're living in a fantasy world. Their opposition was so shameless that even supposedly serious people like Grasssley embraced Palin's rhetoric about "death panels". So don't give me this BS about Obama and the Democrats not being bipartisan enough. Your party decided to blow up the system in order to whip up its base. And today it's reaping the rewards of this strategy in the form of TRUMP and Cruz being the frontrunners for the nomination.