Just before the House passed the health care bil, Nancy Pelosi sent out a letter.    In it, she said that “An op-ed by E.J. Dionne on Friday reveals that the current health reform legislation pending before Congress was “built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.”  She bolded Dionne’s headline: Why Democrats Are [...]

Now that this bill will become law the important question is where do we go from here on health care reform? I have said before that I think this bill is deeply flawed and, most importantly, does not provide an clear pathway to eventually getting real reform. But now that this bill is the new [...]

Matt Yglesias analyzes the “failure of the progressive block strategy,” and chalks it up to progressives not picking issues that “centrists” care about. He doesn’t note his own role in that failure, vilifying the leader of the progressive block Raul Grijalva as “the world’s greatest monster” unless he backs down. (Our own whip effort started [...]

Today’s vote in the Senate to pass their health care reform bill was a big win for many people. It was a big win for the drug companies, the biologics industry, the hospital companies, and the for-profit health insurance corporations. They will all get billions of government dollars piled on to their ledgers, and and [...]

One of the better-sounding arguments for passing the Senate bill is that “we can fix it later.” While this does sound appealing at first glance, I just don’t see “fixing it later” happening in the next decade or two. Democrats currently have huge majorities in both Houses and the presidency. I can’t imagine there being [...]

Circumventing conference can’t happen without the help of progressive members of the House. There are 83 members of the Progressive Caucus I believe.

It will present a whole host of interesting organizing opportunities that we haven’t seen before when rage in these communities allows us to put up reform challengers who will siphon off the strongest activist support over a health. Since those districts have no chance of ever going Republican, it would shake up the entire dynamic and pose the first real threat that many of these members have ever had.

I think the inherent problem with the left-leaning “compromisers” is that they are unwilling to think outside the box. They may have progressive hopes, but they are not radicals in the traditional sense. They are unwilling go the extra yard for what they believe in. They don’t realize that the only way institutions change is [...]

I’ve heard some in the establishment media argue that progressives have become too fixated on the issue of a robust public option. The fight to include a public option is not a simply philosophical argument or an insider policy battle. The fight for the public option is inseparable from the fight to make health insurance [...]