“So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin’ lost.”

[swag]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/the_intransigence_of_democrats_from_obama_on_down_to_red_state_senators.html

How Democrats Got a Spine

The Republican Party taught them how to be uncompromising.

By David Weigel

Excerpts:

House Democrats, powerless as they are, provided the GOP almost no cover in the early stages of the shutdown fight. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy declared a “bipartisan vote” for the defunding of Obamacare and asked reporters to “write that down.” Reporters judiciously decided not to pretend that two Democratic votes from deep-red districts meant that the GOP had bipartisan support. Few Democrats backed the next round of Republican-proposed continuing resolutions. Only at the end of this week, when the GOP retreated to a plan of poll-tested “mini-CRs” to fund veterans’ pensions and treatment for kids with cancer, did dozens of Democrats start to vote with them. Right after they did so, they endorsed their leadership’s demand for a “clean CR” to be brought to the floor by force.

The intransigence of Democrats, from Obama on down to red-state senators, has surprised the GOP. They honestly expected a few of the Democrats to crack—after all, four of them are running for re-election in states that voted for Mitt Romney. “If you’re a Mark Pryor,” said Ted Cruz last week, “if you’re a Mary Landrieu, running for re-election in Arkansas and Louisiana, and you start to get 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, calls from your constituents, suddenly, it changes the calculus entirely.”

Landrieu and Pryor never buckled. They voted with the rest of the party to amend or table every House bill. So did Alaska Sen. Mark Begich and North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan. So did West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate who’s not on the ballot again until 2018 but who’s on the record willing to delay the health insurance mandate. “This is about funding the government,” Manchin told me after one of his votes this week. “This isn’t about social issues.”
. . .

Democrats don’t worry about that. They worry about a “grand bargain” that would ask them to bail out the GOP again and vote for Social Security cuts. But in 2011, conservatives blew up a deal and spared the Democrats that vote. In 2013, conservatives turned the focus to Obamacare, which the party’s never going to undo.

“Dealing with terrorists has taught us some things,” said Washington Rep. Jim McDermott after voting no on one of Thursday’s GOP bills. “You can’t deal with ’em. This mess was created by the Republicans for one purpose, and they lost. People in my district are calling in for Obamacare—affordable health care—in large numbers. These guys have lost, and they can’t figure out how to admit it.” Why would House Democrats give away what the Supreme Court and the 2012 electorate didn’t? “You can’t say, OK, you get half of Obamacare—this isn’t a Solomonic decision,” McDermott said. “So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin’ lost.”

[RosieS57]

1. VERY good read n/t