Publicity stunt or sad example of health care reality?Follow

As many times as you want, it's not like it matters. He doesn't care.

Admitting that will most likely just make him do it more.

I've started completely ignoring him. There's no point to it, he doesn't make sense half the time. He's an incredibly good troll. It's amazing, really.





Edited, Jun 24th 2011 9:49am by Belkira

It's a big chunk of the discretionary budget, but the discretionary budget is typically less than half of total expenditures. Medicare (mandatory), social security (mandatory), military (discretionary) all hover around 20% of the total budget. However, the last decade has mostly seen medicare taking the lions share of the budget (FY2010 = 23%). Health Care reform is vital to this country's finances.

It's political theater, mainly. Ever since its passage, US presidents have had a long, proud history of ignoring the War Powers Act and Congress has a long, proud history of ******** about it. Neither side is confident enough to take it to the mat and risk a judgment on its constitutionality. Even the lawsuit recently filed is a joke -- the last one involving Clinton was thrown out because Congress hadn't exercised all their options. Boehner knows this; he was in Congress for the last lawsuit. Namely...

Lacking a resolution by both chambers of Congress, there is no illegality behind forces remaining (assuming they meet the standard for the War Powers Act, which Obama argues isn't the case but we'll assume it does). This was the basis for the Clinton case being dismissed. The initial part of the act, notifying Congress, was satisfied the Monday after the attacks bega. Possibly even before given Obama's discussions with Congressional leaders but formally on that Monday.

Obama asked Boehner to take up a resolution regarding the military action over a month ago and the House is just getting around to it now. I assume they had hoped the whole thing would be over with by now and avoid putting them in the position of siding with Gaddafi over NATO.

Comparisons between a lengthy, multi-year nation building mission involving tens of thousands of soldiers on the ground and a limited scope air mission are pretty silly. Bush didn't go to Congress because he was some firm believer in the WPA. In fact, he stated:


Bush went to Congress for the purely pragmatic reason that he'd need the funding for the mission scope he envisioned. Obama, I'd assume, is hoping for a speedier resolution before coming to Congress for funding will be an issue.

Edited, Jun 24th 2011 10:38am by Jophiel