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.You know, coddling Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, etc. and sh%$ing on the liberals, in both the House and the Senate can only take you so far.
“We cannot support the Senate bill — period,” is the message that liberals delivered to the Speaker, Dem Rep Raul Grijalva told me in an interview just now.
Some had hoped Pelosi would push liberals to get in line behind this approach, in hopes of expediting reform, but that didn’t appear to happen in this meeting. Pelosi mostly listened, Grijalva said, adding: “We didn’t get any declarative statement from her.”
Notwithstanding the protestations of beltway boyz wannabees like Steve Benen, Matthew Yglesias, and Kevin Drum, it's not the liberals who are at risk.
They have a coherent system of beliefs, and they can honestly sell their decisions, as opposed to the Blue Dog and New Dems, who keep saying how we have to protect the insurance companies, and the liberals generally come from safer districts anyway.
One of the things that people forget about 1994 is that it was the Conservadems who got voted out.
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