This happened two years ago. They needed to win with a 60 vote margin. It didn’t pass.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/house-insulin-prices/
The bill didn’t need to pass with a 60 vote margin. The House is simple majority, and it passed the house. It’s a little murky to me what happened next, but it seems like the Democrats were arguing that it could be treated as budget reconciliation in the Senate, only needing simple majority. However, the parliamentarian said it’s not budget reconciliation, and so it would have needed 60 votes total in the Senate to get past the filibuster, which it didn’t have.
Then, strangely, the Senate amended the entire title and text of the bill and turned it into a general appropriations bill, which passed both houses and became law, but with the entire original text of the bill struck.
Maybe someone a little more familiar than me with the machinations of government can fill in some of the gaps of what exactly happened and why. My point is, you’re right that it didn’t pass, but neither house of Congress requires a 60 vote margin. The Senate requires 60 votes total for a bill to be filibuster proof.
The Senate has a de facto requirement for a 60 vote margin because Republicans will, without fail, use the filibuster to block any bill that doesn’t sufficiently own the libs. (I was gonna say any bill they don’t like, but they’ll even block their own bills if Democrats decide to support it.)
“This is corruption”
“This is lobbying”
No, it’s FUCKING EVIL
Those people are evil enough to put money ahead of the health of other humans
And if you stand by and watch people doing evil things and just say “Well, it’s lobbying” you’re a wretched coward
It’s worse. They put money above the life of other humans. Type 1 diabetics literally cannot live without insulin… Not for very long at least (days at most).
And it’s not a nice death either. Anyone who has seen, first hand, the effects of diabetic ketoacidosis, can confirm.
We see pictures all the time of dafties walking about with signs in the US protesting all sorts of inane, brain-damaged shite
How the fuck are yous not standing outside these evil fuckers’ houses with signs?
“This evil cunt chose to kill diabetics because some evil cunt gave him cash. Let’s hang him from a fucking tree, he’s an absolute cancer on society”
How are yous just sitting back and watching?!?
I’m not doing shit because I’m not an American.
Thank fuck for that. This shit is goddamned embarrassing.
I think my country just passed a law saying that our national healthcare system would cover insulin and diabetic equipment. I don’t have all the details, but the fact that it took this long to do is pretty fucking embarrassing in and of itself.
That being said, at least we got there. The USA can’t even agree to not bankrupt people for having a very manageable condition (with proper medication at least).
Republicans Republicans is triggering my paranoia and OCD
It’s like one of those things that goes:
I bet that you’re not reading this very carefully. You almost certainly won’t even notice the the mistake in it at first.
Except they fucked up where to put the line break
That’s called chunking. Basically, you don’t read every word in a sentence you just process units, or chunks, that you are familiar with, in this case “the mistake”. The first the is in a different chunk than the one right next to “mistake” and since that chunk is not restricting or altering proper resolution (based on your expectation), it gets scrapped at the end of processing the text.
Another culminating factor that makes it hard to spot the duplicate has something to do with eyesight. Essentially, our eyes have 2 modi: fixation and sacchades. Fixation is the standard modus and the optical nerve sends the stimuli to the brain uninterruptedly. Since the duplicates are at the end and the beginning of the next line, you have to move your eyes a longer distance to keep reading; you are performing a so-called sacchade. In order to prevent blurry sight and nausea stemming thereof when you move your eyes to another focal point (same principle like a blurry image from moving a camera while taking a picture), the optical nerve stops sending pictures to the brain during the movement. Upon reaching your new focal point, the brain backfills your memory of the travel time with the first picture it receives from the new position. This masking is called chronostasis because a very noticeable occurrence of this is that the time seems to stop for a brief moment when looking at a clock and the first second feels way longer than the following ones.
Yes, more people will be able to buy it the medicine and the people selling sugar will lose some. Can’t people make bigger profit of something useful to humanity or the earth instead?
Republicans
“The government shouldn’t control anything”
“The government needs to ban abortion people tho”
Yeah this is why I hate anarchism. Obviously we need a state to enforce all the human rights violations /s
In a true anarchist society, what stops the very same people who are committing human rights violations now under the guise of government from doing the same thing as freelancers?
People in government have a lot more power then those who aren’t in government. In anarchism, everyone would be on an equal level. Therefore a “freelancer” wouldn’t have the power to do the mass-scale human rights abuses that they would if they were in government.
but also… I’m not necessarily an anarchist nor am I against anarchism
In terms of the world’s wealth, if you own a million dollars US or more - you’re one of the top 1%, richest people on the planet.
This means ALL of the people in Congress and the Senate are in the top 1%, or being very close to it.
America is ruled by a wealthy ruling class.
A quick search shows that $5.8 million is the threshold to be in the top 1% net worth in the US.
You are comparing apples and oranges on purpose by comparing US lawmakers, making laws for the USA, against the world top 1% metric.
The problem there is he said worldwide, not in the US. The searches I’m doing for amount of wealth needed to be in the top 1% worldwide does seem to be around a million dollars. And I mean since a lot of what the US does affects the rest of the world through US companies and the influence the US has you can definitely argue we are led by the 1% who are enacting laws to benefit themselves and the people in their class.
In the USA, the threshold for top 1% of net worth is $5.8 million.
Not saying that congress isn’t disproportionately rich, but 1% absolutely does not start at $1 million.
if you have a million you’re one of the richest ON THE PLANET
The planet is bigger than the USA buddy
It certainly is, but when we’re talking about US leadership, global wealth comparisons are irrelevant when talking about the moneyed elites. It needs to be national comparisons.
If you only looked at global wealth metrics, you’d think the US was full of rich people who could afford everything, and it very clearly is not the case. There’s plenty of Americans living in poverty and paycheck to paycheck, even though their wealth would be considered high globally. You have to normalize by cost of living. If someone makes $1m annually but they spend $975k to meet the bare minimum, are they rich?
one of the requirements of getting into congress or senate should be that when you are getting in AND out you should donate any sum of assets exceeding a couple millions. then anyone wanting to use government as a means of making money by licking the ass of powerful lobbies will mostly stay away. this will not completely eliminate the problem (there will still be people willing to work for lobbies for a couple mil) but will lessen the importance of wealth on politics greatly (along with not allowing donations to presidential candidates or organizations promoting them in anyway).
You’re conflating two things here. You’re taking the top 1% of global wealth and equating that with America and saying it means they’re a wealthy ruling class.
Which I don’t necessarily disagree with in fact, but the premise of your argument is flawed. You need to look at what the top 1% in the US is. The US is heavily skewed towards the top of global wealth in general.
It would be like saying the US is mainly oligarchs and there aren’t people suffering because Americans tend to have more wealth than others. You have to normalize it within the country – or at least against a cost of living index.
if you own a million dollars US or more - you’re one of the top 1%, richest people on the planet.
Is an American with a small house in some hyper-inflated corner of the California real estate market really wealthier than a guy out in Malaysia or Nigeria who owes property that’s 1/10th the price but can pay $2/day for an army of laborers?
I think this puts too much faith in the value of the American dollar relative to the functional value of real estate and human labor trading at a fraction of the price thousands of miles away. Real wealth needs to have some degree of political power behind it. A guy with a $500 rifle who can command a hundred acres of turf and a thousand other people is - in my opinion - substantially wealthier than a guy with a $500,000 condo who owes his continued existence to some Madison Avenue ad agency.
This means ALL of the people in Congress and the Senate are in the top 1%
All the people in Congress and the Senate command votes in one of the wealthiest political bodies on the planet. Having a 1/438 share in the $5T us appropriations budget is worth far more than a piddly million dollars in a savings account.
