Raul Grijalva
A Plea to Liberals
Most progressive members of the House will vote for health care reform. But there are a handful of liberals making loud noises about rejecting it. They may not be bluffing. Some of them, like Dennis Kucinich, actually cast nay votes against the House bill last November. But this time, every vote will count. So, those liberals may be the difference between success and failure. READ MORE >>
Keeping Tally in the House
News on health care reform will increasingly be about individual members, as President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi try to accumulate the 216--er, now 217--votes House Democrats need to pass the Senate bill. The widely held assumption among insiders is that the Democrats can count upon about 200 "yes" votes right now, or maybe a few more. There are, meanwhile, somewhere between 30 and 40 House Democratic votes up for grabs. READ MORE >>
The Left's Chance At Redemption
In their letter to President Obama on his proposed health care summit, John Boehner and Eric Cantor ask, Will the President include in this discussion congressional Democrats who have opposed the House and Senate health care bills? READ MORE >>
What Kind of Insurance Do You Have, Rep. Grijalva?
Matthew Spieler asks a good question: I have a question for politicians like Rep. Raul Grijalva, Rep. Anthony Weiner, and the the folks at Firedoglake who would rather kill reform than enact the Senate bill: what kind of health insurance do you have? ... READ MORE >>
Where's the Obama I Voted For?
If you’ve been a Democrat for more than two or three years, disappointment with your leaders is something that comes rather naturally. From the 1970s until well into the previous decade, the party produced presidents and presidential candidates like Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. These men weren’t lovable losers. They were just losers. Even the lone winner among them--Bill Clinton--famously and infamously found ways to disappoint. READ MORE >>
House Liberals Tell Pelosi: No Sale
Via Greg Sargent at The Plum Line: In a private meeting in the Capitol just now, a dozen or more House liberals bluntly told Nancy Pelosi that there was no chance that they would vote to pass the Senate bill in its current form — making it all but certain that House Dems won’t opt for this approach, a top House liberal tells me READ MORE >>
Grijalva: Use Reconciliation to Pass Reform
As Democratic leaders scramble to salvage the imperiled reform bill, Congressional liberals seem increasingly wary about a plan that would ask the House to pass the current version of the Senate bill and send the bill directly to Obama’s desk. “The House needs to be very careful about not merely rubber-stamping the Senate bill and sending that to the president… I just don’t think it’s wise policy or wise politics to merely regurgitate [it],” Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me this morning. READ MORE >>
Watching and Waiting
Talkin' Bout a Revolution?
On the eve of the Senate vote, Representative Louise Slaughter, chair of the House Rules Committee, became the latest progressive to join a growing faction of liberals who have called for Congress to the kill health-care reform bill—and the first prominent legislator to do so. “The Senate health care bill is not worthy of the historic vote that the House took a month ago,” Slaughter wrote in an op-ed published yesterday on CNN.com. READ MORE >>
