Mea culpa. @Devil, turns out I was wrong and Warren still plans to work on M4A in her first term (in the first hundred days, in fact) by lowering the enrollment age to 50 and letting anyone who wants to buy in to Medicare, and intends to pass M4A legislation by her third year in office.
This Washington Post article from when she rolled out the new plan makes it seem like the biggest change she made was making M4A enrollment an option, and not just automatically enrolling everybody in Medicare and killing off private insurance.
The broad strategy is correct though, it’s not really specific to anti enviromentalism. Everyone’s always trying to connect stuff to everyman problems. It’s the same with tax enforcement. Republicans are all talking about cutting the IRS because they say some beefed up IRS is going to be auditing every Joe Plumber if it had the chance while a beefed up IRS would affect the average person like 1% tax wise, and major corporations and rich people 1000000%.
The lightbulb thing is funny because conservatives were complaining about it when Obama made some regulation and then everyone got LED and other other kinds of lights and were like, “oh wait changing light bulbs out once every couple of years instead of every few months for cheaper in the long term is way better” and it mostly went to the fluoride in water levels of care.
If you think that Warren is going to pass legislation in her first 100 days, year, two years, whatever, to expand Medicare to 50+ and put in place a public option… which will be a fight of a greater magnitude than the Obamacare fight… then turn around and do it all over again AFTER THE MIDTERM ELECTION to get Medicare for All done… I’ve got a lovely bridge I’d like to sell you.
The president almost always loses seats in the midterm, so even if they get the Senate majority in 2020 and pass all that stuff after a massive fight, they’re extremely likely to lose the Senate in 2022 and there’s no way anything is getting done with the GOP in control obviously. The GOP will run the midterm campaign on repealing and replacing the socialist takeover of our healthcare system.
It’ll either be a Democratic House and Republican Senate or she’ll be vetoing repeals of whatever she passed, not passing new stuff.
When she says she wants to do something in the third year to expand upon what she did in the first two, she’s either so politically naive she doesn’t realize that she’s likely to see her party lose the midterms, or she’s banking on that so that she can run on it while knowing she’ll never end up doing it, then throw up her hands and say, “Welp, I would have done it, but we lost the Senate. Too bad! Vote for me in 2024 and we’ll try again.”
Private insurance doesn’t need to be gone by then, but the legislation needs to be passed all at once. I don’t object to a transition period, and I’d even be ok with one that took longer than 4 years, but there is absolutely no scenario where this gets done in two parts within one presidential term.
I think the most likely path to the Dems holding the White House and both chambers on Congress probably involves not quite getting there in 2020 in the Senate and finally getting a majority in 2022.
Maybe the president’s party usually loses seats in the mid-term, but not always. Democratic strategy should probably be based on maximizing the chances of gaining Senate seats in the mid-terms. The question is whether Warren’s two-stage plan gives Dems a good platform for running against vulnerable Republican incumbents in 2022.
Warren’s probably going to be the best Democrat at using the power of the executive branch to get things done to get around a Republican Senate.
Also there is a zero point zero zero percent chance true universal healthcare coverage gets passed after a public option goes live and 50+ year-olds get the ability to enroll. America’s national sport is Fuck You I Got Mine, and there’s no reason to think that mindset wouldn’t get wheeled out and mobilized to undermine a push towards universal once those groups Get Theirs.
I know I’m cheerleading my guy here, but I really think Bernie’s approach of “vote out these fuckers that are blocking me from helping the American people” will be more effective at mobilizing midterm support than Warren’s approach of “we got a little bit and need your help to get a little bit more”
My point was it’s unfair to criticize Warren for the unlikeliness of her plan coming true without doing that for all candidates.
Put another way for him, in 4 years if President Sanders us running for re-election I don’t expect too many of his supporters to abandon him if all he got in 4 years is a public option/medicare for some. Most would snap take that right now.
My take is that Warren’s priority is anti-corruption more than it is health care reform. Her basic instinct is that Medicare for All is the place we need to end up, but it’s not going to be the #1 priority that she expends the most political capital on. She’s aware that something probably doesn’t pass without Joe Manchin’s vote before 2022, so her pragmatic plan involves trying to come up with a way to pass something now while retaining M4A as a concrete goal. She’s also aware that the filibuster is a problem, so she wants to get rid of the filibuster while Sanders wants to pass Medicare for All while preserving the filibuster.
