{"id":755,"date":"2010-03-04T03:02:24","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T11:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=755"},"modified":"2010-03-04T03:02:24","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T11:02:24","slug":"has-obama-grown-a-spine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2010\/03\/04\/has-obama-grown-a-spine\/","title":{"rendered":"Has Obama Grown a Spine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the first time, Obama actually told Congress what to do.<\/font><\/p>\n

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\"obama-health\"<\/a> Today, President Barack Obama delivered a speech from the White House outlining his plan to move forward on health care reform.  Advocating the use of budget reconciliation in order to get disputed portions of the reform package through the Senate on a simple-majority vote, Obama pointedly said, "I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health-care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly. And now it deserves the same kind of up or down vote that was used for welfare reform<\/strong>…."<\/p>\n

Obama called the past year’s jockeying over health-care reform "a long and wrenching debate." He noted the difficulty of addressing the issue, including the risk to members of Congress in election season. "That’s not an excuse for those of us who were sent here to lead," he said.<\/p>\n

Art Levine of Working In These Times warns that some centrist Democrats<\/a> are already getting cold feet on reconciliation. Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chair of the Senate Budget Committee, went on TV to declare reconciliation impossible. These guys just don\u2019t get it. It\u2019s reconciliation or defeat. There is no other way. Without reconciliation, the bill dies. Without a bill, the Democrats get massacred in the mid-term elections<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Now, I could tell you in detail what he said, but he speaks better than I write, so here is the speech in its entirety.<\/font><\/p>\n

Part 1:<\/font><\/p>\n

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Part 2:<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/font><\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the first time, Obama actually told Congress what to do. Today, President Barack Obama delivered a speech from the White House outlining his plan to move forward on health care reform.  Advocating the use of budget reconciliation in order to get disputed portions of the reform package through the Senate on a simple-majority vote, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}