Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Yesterday I suggested that maybe Senate Dems should go ahead and put up a big public fight over repeal of healthcare reform. Sure, they could spend their time trying to pass bills to nationalize the coal mines or set up reeducation centers for tea party members, but they’d just get filibustered anyway, so why bother? Why not spend the next month forcing Republicans to take embarrassing votes on amendments to put the Medicare donut hole back in place, or to let insurers turn down people with preexisting conditions instead?

Well, Ezra Klein had a good question about that: “As a general point, I think ‘making people take semi-embarrassing votes’ is vastly overrated in American politics. Can anyone think of a campaign that even partly turned on one of these gambits?” Jonathan Bernstein agrees. But Barry Pump dives into the literature and says that while it’s hard to tie a specific election result to a specific roll call vote, maybe that doesn’t matter:

Finally, and I think this is the most important factor, both Mayhew and Arnold argue that members of Congress believe that voters are retrospective, so whether they are or not is besides the point. They structure voting situations because they think campaigns and elections may turn on certain roll calls….Now, is that position overrated? Well, some research suggests so. But another response could be, for the reason above, who cares if it’s overrated? When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Pump also points to Bart Stupak as a possible example of someone who was undone by a roll call vote, and I suspect you could come up with some other examples in swing districts too. But whether this strategy works or not, Brian Beutler reports that apparently Senate Democrats are looking at it pretty favorably:

A top Democratic aide tells me that leadership staffers are considering ways to make Republicans take tough votes on popular elements of the bill, as Republicans figure out if and how they’ll force a vote on full repeal.

Nothing’s been finalized, including precisely how they’d go about it. But the point would be to turn a global health care repeal push into something more piecemeal — should seniors pay back their $250 doughnut hole check? Should children with pre-existing conditions be stripped of insurance?

“Senior staff are giving serious consideration to the strategy of forcing Republicans to take tough votes on extremely popular elements of the health care law, including the doughnut hole provision, as well as pre-existing conditions,” the aide said.

Well, why not? Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. Probably it won’t, especially so long before an election. But Republicans have made it clear that they don’t plan to do any serious legislating until they’re finished holding timewasting symbolic votes in a desperate effort to assuage their tea party base, so why not give it a try? At the very least, maybe it will send a message to the GOP leadership that two can play at dumb legislative games.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate