There was absolutely no reason for Kaine to vote Yes given the election results in Virginia. Durbin is a member of Senate Leadership. He should not have voted Yes, either. Shaneen is retiring so her Yes vote is inexplicable as well. I 100% believe all three of them were protecting other Senators who are up in 2026 and wanted to vote Yes but swapped their votes with one of the three above. The betrayal in our party runs deep.

But I don't believe there was any conspiracy to protect anyone here. I think they are just completely out of touch and wrong.

They know they need eight votes, so they picked the least vulnerable eight. But I think it means there were plenty more than eight who approve of the strategy, including Schumer.

of not giving Democratic elected officials the tools they need and then blaming them for not getting everything done.

Biden won by over 7 million votes, he accomplished a ton, he was giving voters what they claimed to want, and yet that majority vanished, pouf, gone.

I am so fucking over the vanishing voters. They own this as much as anyone.

All of this shit was on the ballot. None of this was secret.

Me2!

Voters are doing their part. We are not the problem.

It's people who sat out the election in 2024 that made this happen.

And for democratic causes. 7 million hit the streets for No Kings Day. People are not vanishing, their mobilizing. Our leaders are not taking the hint.

They are handcuffed by the results in 2024. You can't disappear at the ballot box and then come out a year later in the streets and complain.

I'll be interested to see what the turnout is like for the next No Kings Day, or if people will be asking Schumer "What's the point?"

You can disagree all you want. But voters are weird and fickle. I know people who were all charged up to vote for Obama but wouldn't bother to vote in other elections. It wasn't that Obama's policies were all that different from Gore and Kerry, but they showed up for some elections and not others.

I know people who voted for Nader in 2000.

I know people who wouldn't support Hillary.

Those same people claim to want healthcare and SNAP and to protect Social Security but they won't freaking be committed voters and then they demand perfection from elected officials.

I am over it. When we consistently give our elected Democratic officials the tools to enact our agendas and then they fail, I will complain. But we don't. It's maddening.

(I quite apologize, I edited my post after you replied. I typed 2026, I intended 2025. Because I'm talking about the people out there today.)

It's not about 2024. Or Nader, or Hillary. This is TODAY. They didn't disappear in the last election, or for the October 18 marches. So my point is that Schumer has the people out there, it's about him following their lead -- or not. And, apparently, it's not.

It bothers me. Voters are weird. They flip back and forth, or they get excited about one candidate and then vanish for the next one even though their policies are almost identical. I have almost never had my first candidate of choice be the nominee but I didn't sit out an election because of it or vote third party or complain that the Democrats can't get things done when they aren't in power.

Biden won by a huge margin and got things done and that lead evaporated.

I know thats another whole can of worms but the way the DNC/Democratic leadership handled the 2024 election nomination was sus.

would have prevented all of the atrocities we're witnessing. But yeah, let's handcuff Democrats and then scream that they are spineless, weak, shills, etc because they're not doing exactly what we want.

when we had control of both houses and failed to take the bold, sweeping steps we could have taken to put a stop to all of this. We let Democratic party leadership "handle" the slow-tracking prosecution plan of Merrick Garland, and missed the best opportunity we ever will have to put that bastard on trial and get convictions for what he'd done. They thought that might look "too poitical." So he got away with it! Nor were we willing to take the steps we needed to pack the damn supreme court and save Roe, knock down Citizens United, and expidite his criminal trials by bypassing the pettyness of the Eileen Canons of the judicial system in order to get real justice.

And this doesn't?

If you want to see a real Democrat who actually believes, with most of the rest of us, that Trump is the greatest threat American democracy has ever experienced, look at the reaction of Senator Bernie Sanders to this cave in. And he's not even a Democrat.

Are our party leaders afraid of Trump? That's what it looks like, either afraid of Trump, or in his pocket too, or unwilling to make the kind of sacrifies we are going to have to make because they are more interested in protecting their turf than protecting their supporters and constituents.

And I'm in NY and he's my Senator.

But Jeffries has been a very effective Leader.

There are enough democrats in the pocket of big money that they ensure nothing radical gets accomplished. In the past 30 years, the few times democrats had the trifecta, it was always by a slim margin and we had to work with the Manchins/Sinemas of the party.

The things Biden got accomplished were nothing short of a miracle but they could have been so so much more.

Even ACA in the Obama years was a long slog of compromise with a couple turncoats. Remember Joe Lieberman?

We also ran strong potential leaders out of the party, a la Franken and Howard Dean. Once again I suspect on the orders of big money.

is that people are blaming the cavers and Schumer (who seems to have orchestrated this whole debacle).

BUT, this will be the thing that does destroy the ACA and they are complicit in its demise, willingly so, eagerly so.

To be fair, I'm betting they will all benefit through donations from large health care corporate donations, because once they can charge whatever they want to, they won't need the economy of scale from having nearly everyone covered, they'll be able to reap their profits by overcharging the few who do still have coverage and the poor schmucks who have to use the ER as their only provider.

Well, that's if the ERs are still required to stabilize people by the end of this. There is a non-zero chance that the law will be changed and hospitals will be allowed (encouraged) to let people die to avoid dealing with people who don't have coverage or the means to pay up front.

yes INDEED

This constant wholesale bashing of Democrats is not helpful. Be pissed off at the 8, but can we please give the "Dems suck" narrative a rest?

Same guy who didn’t endorse Mamdani and won’t tell us who he voted for.

I hope everyone is forever up his ass for that bullshit.

anger should be directed at Rs.

The ACA subsidies are not the only thing in the world that is important.

A lot of people evidently don't realize just how many more lives were on the line than just those risking outrageously high insurance premiums. You know, people without jobs because of being furloughed, people without food, for starters.