Will Bush's SS Mess Pass?

[Jack_Dawson]

Can someone break it down for me...does it have a realistic shot at passing? How many Senate votes are needed? I've heard all 44 dems are against. I've heard Jeffords is against. And I've heard 10 other pukes are on the fence.

What about the House?

Tell me it won't pass.

[Walt Starr]

1. I'm sorry, but I figured we'd get more Dems on board against Gonzales

so I figure Social Security is a done deal. It will be killed.

[Jack_Dawson]

4. That makes no sense

So Dems are sheep or they're not?

[Walt Starr]

7. Reid said all Dems would be on board

Ben Nelson went with * to Nebraksa. Strike one.
Lieberman is allegedly wavering. Strike two.
Landrieu may have problems staying on board. Strike three.

Then Carper, Bill Nelson, and Salazar may jump ship.

Game over.

Done deal.

[Jack_Dawson]

8. So what will be killed?

:beer:

[Walt Starr]

10. Social Security, which is the goal of the bush administration

That's what this thread is about.

[Jack_Dawson]

11. Riiiight

Thought you meant Bush's SS Mess will be killed, which is what the thread title was about. No worries.

JD

[Walt Starr]

14. LOL, sorry

Social Security itself will be killed if the waverers jump ship.

[eleny]

2. I'm reserving judgement

The shrub has time to threaten and armtwist those Repubs. I may even be motivated to pray as reason and logic don't govern America.

[Cary]

3. I could tell you it won't pass, but it would be worth as much as my . . .

prediction that the American public would never have been stupid enough to put that SOB back into office to inflict us with this kind of garbage for another 4 years.

Sorry. I'm suffering here too.

[King Coal]

5. My fear is that it won't stand as its presently drawn

but they will modify it just a little and enough Dems will vote for it and then it will be stolen from us.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. If you watched the vote over medicare

your answer is in there... but this time I suspect the strong arming will happen well before the vote. Delay cannot afford antoher four and a half hour open floor, arm twisting even in the dead of night.

Oh and the answer is, sadly yes

[papau]

9. It will not pass - Addon accounts may pass along with a wage base

increase and a retirement age increase from Reagan's 67 to 68.

If the GOP push for more, they will get nothing.

[txaslftist]

12. He'll have to french four more dem senators to get it to pass.

[Jack_Dawson]

13. He needs 3/5 of the senate?

I can't remember.

[txaslftist]

16. No, I was already counting the dems listed above as being ...

in his camp. He'll get all the pukes in a party line vote.

[Warren Stupidity]

15. The house will pass some abomination.

The rethugs in the senate can do two things to force this through if they so choose:

1) abolish the fillibuster, requires a rules change, I don't think the dems can fillisbuster a rules change vote;

2) tack it on to a budget bill - rules ban fillibusters on budget bills.

The only thing stopping them is fear of voter reaction in 2006.
My guess is that they will not go for (1) or (2) directly out of voter reaction fear. They could run a bunch of nazi judge nominees at the dems first in order to play (1) out not against killing SS but instead on the 'obstruction of justice' ploy. That way is win-win for the thugs, either they get their nazis on the bench or they get to nuke the fillibuster with cover, or better yet BOTH. I think they will at least try this, don't you?

Once they nuke the fillibuster they can pass killing SS with a simple majority.

The other approach is to reach a 'compromise' with the 4-6 asshole dems and the wavering 3-4 oddly 'moderate' rethugs like Snow. What's the compromise?

Good question, glad you asked. Here is the follow up question: what was missing from the abomination detailed before *'s STFU speach? You are right! It was rearranging the SS COLA to be cpi adjusted rather than wage adjusted. So the compromise would slide in the cpi COLA as a SS fix, and the MSM will dutifully ignore the fact that this is a huge benefit cut and we will all get screwed. Plus of course some portion (2%?) of the FICA will get diverted to wall street via the piratization so that they can take their cut. But 'benefits' will be 'saved', only they won't.

[LiviaOlivia]

28. "Fear of voter reaction in 2006"- I hope

Wise Words
Feb. 04, 2005

Gene Sperling, a while back, on why defaulting on the trust fund debt in order to preserve the Bush tax cuts is just wrong, damnit:

Now, let me ask you this. How could a member of Congress go home to a town meeting like this and say, “We have no choice but to cut your benefits. We just cannot fix SS any other way than by changing it to price-indexing so that instead of getting 36 percent of your current earnings in retirement you’ll only get 20 percent. Imagine what that would be now, but we have no choice to do that.” What would you say to the first person in the audience who put up their hand and said, “Well, let me get this right. You just gave a tax cut to people making over $300,000 that would have been large enough to not have to cut any of our benefits at all, so it’s not that we have to do this. You’ve made a policy choice – a value choice. You would rather take a certain amount of funds and direct it to the top 1 percent and pay for that, essentially, by letting our benefits be cut. Or, to put it another way, leave no choice but for our now benefits to be cut.”

Nobody could possibly answer that person in a town-hall meeting. What could they say? Now, I think for that reason there are a lot of progressives who are saying we ought to fix Social Security entirely by repealing the tax cut for the top 1 percent. Why should we cut anyone’s benefits?


http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/

[jedr]

17. the grays

the Gray's vote and have a lot of power, if I was up for re-election I would be scared......aarp doesn't want s.s. messed with like this....lets hope they have the power to stop it....

[Warren Stupidity]

18. AARP

You mean the AARP that went along with the medicare 'drugged benefit' abomination? That AARP?

The rethugs are real good at the bamboozle. By the time they are finished bamboozling the pink-tutu dems and orgs like AARP they will have them thinking that the compromise they are supporting is a victory and that they are saving social security.

[Teaser]

19. No. Bush will lose on this one.

Contrary to the mythology presented above, we haven't lost anyone from our caucus yet.

[elperromagico]

20. I think the plan is to filibuster it in the Senate.

It's essentially what they did to a handful of Bush's more conservative judicial nominees.

You need 60 votes to knock back a filibuster.

If Reid is right, and all 44 Dems are against it, the GOP's got 56 votes. Subtract Jeffords from that, and they've got only 55 votes. Subtract a couple of your more moderate Repubs, and you've got even less.

[Warren Stupidity]

21. See my other post.

They can kill the fillibuster via a rules change using 'justice obstruction' as the cover. Then they can pass social insecurity by a simple majority.

[elperromagico]

23. I hope that doesn't happen,

but clearly the Republicans have the advantage when it comes to changing rules.

Our only hope then would be to beat it in a straight vote, and I have my doubts about that.

Too many Dems are iffy. Too few Repubs aren't.

They can lose five and still win in a straight vote, with trusty ol' Dick breaking the tie. We can't lose any; in fact, we need at least six Repubs.

It's a situation where we either knock Bush and the neocons back a few steps, or get knocked flat on our asses. And we've been getting knocked on our asses a lot lately by Bush & Co.

[EVDebs]

22. Dems need only hold the line : This is truly "Their Finest Hour"

as only a few Brit airmen held off the Nazis during the Battle of Britain in WWII. The smart Republicans will come around, as we are talking about destroying this country with a mountain of debt if Bush's Folly continues much longer... Tick Tick Tick !

[FreeStateDemocrat]

34. It will be either “Their Finest Hour” or their final hour.

If they cave here it will be the end of the Democratic Party since it will no longer have any justification to exist. If working class America cannot count on the Democratic Party to protect their vital interests on SS they will not support its candidates in 2006 and beyond.

[jswordy]

24. The original version will fail, but a modified version...

...arrived at after many meetings between the sides will pass with the support of many Democrats, probably sometime in early 2006.

This will be especially so if, as is the case so far, the polls show that Bush is gaining traction with the American people on this issue.

CBS poll says 56 pecent support Bush after speech...but...:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/03/politics/main671570.shtml

Various poll questions on SS and the responses:

http://www.pollingreport.com/social.htm

AARP poll shows Dems the way...but will they go there?

http://www.aarp.org/research/press/presscurrentnews/Articles/item696286499.html

[Jack_Dawson]

25. When will America wake up?

I still say it's gonna have to be The Draft. God I hope it's soon.

[Telly Savalas]

26. This could potentially work out...

like the GOP's attack on Clinton's health care plan. Bush's SS privatization plan is stupid on so many levels, that if the Democrats play it right they can go on the offensive with this issue. Bush can try to strong-arm his Senate caucus all he wants, but if they know they'll get booted by the electorate in '06 because they destroyed SS, they'll ignore the chimp.

Somebody else in this thread posted this article from the AARP. Here's a key quote:

After initial supporters had been exposed to all of the consequences of diverting payroll taxes to fund private accounts, only 10% still favored them. This means, in the context of the entire survey sample, that only 5% favored this approach once the consequences were evident.

Once all the facts are on the table, 95% of Americans are on our side. So if Newt Gingrich and his homies were able to make a sensible health care plan look like the work of Satan, then we should stand a reasonable chance of exposing the GOP SS demolition project for the fraud it is (even with a corporate right-wing media working against us.) I'm not saying our victory is guaranteed. I'm just urging us, to quote a great Democrat, to "KEEP HOPE ALIVE"!

[More Than A Feeling]

27. talkingpointsmemo.com is doing an excellent job

of following that very concern.

As it stands now, there is no way in hell this becomes law. Of course, things could change after Bush's tour is over. Too many republicans in both house and senate are afraid of this, and very few dems are shaky.

If nothing else, there is the filibuster.

[charles_nys]

29. Some Repugs are questioning it ...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=2&u=/ap/20050204/ap_on_go_co/social_security_12

[marcologico]

30. Nope, but expect a full MSM-SBVT- fake Gallup poll press from Chimpster

who apparently sees himself as the Messiah of unequal opportunity.

He'll probably give up when the bottom falls out of the dollar or the smell of death from Iraq finally changes the subject.

[The Minus World]

31. I'm betting it won't

It seems as though there's unanimity in opposition from the Democrats; it also seems that the Bush plan to cut benefits is so egregious that quite a few Republicans have expressed skepticism. In these times, where falling out of lockstep is a death-sentence within the Republican party, it seems quite a statement for a Republican to do such a thing.

One thing that seems reassuring about this whole debacle is that, ignoring the rabid 30% of the American population who would support gulags for those they disagree with politically, most Americans are beginning to understand that there is no crisis; it's a manufactured outrage.

Then again, it has been proven again and again that one can sell anything to the American people, given the right P.R. and total ideological control.

[bklyncowgirl]

32. Not in its current form

Expect some concessions from the White House to allow moderates to save face. The concessions will not amount to a hill of beans and in the long run will hurt the middle class.

[snippy]

33. I agree that the current proposal is dead, but I worry that Bush will

prevail with some form of his plan. The White House is pretty good at marketing Bush's attrocities.

I think that the release of some of the details of Bush's plan was just the first step in a negotiation process. Bush will make some concessions to individual members of Congress to win their votes, but he knew he would have to do this all along.

[marcologico]

35. Sure, they'll raise the retirement age again, but forget private accounts.

The GOP doesn't want to pay for them and Dems sure as hell don't either.