How the ghost of Obamacare haunts the presidency of Nancy Pelosi



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HSpeaker of the Parliament, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Begins to be frustrated by the fact that Centrist Democrats voted for votes that might reflect their individual political considerations, but would undermine the interests of the party as a whole. The difficulty she encounters is complicated by the legacy of Obamacare.

Republicans in the House have used the little power they have in the minority to force Democrats to vote with tough votes dividing their caucuses. On Wednesday, Republicans used a parliamentary tool known as a "re-engagement motion" to get the centrist Democrats to add an amendment to a gun control bill to inform the government of the day. Immigration and Customs Enforcement if an illegal immigrant tried to buy a firearm. This meant that the other members of the caucus had to vote for the CIE provision, which they hated, in order to pass their gun control legislation.

As my colleague Susan Ferrechio reported, Pelosi now asks his caucus to vote, as a rule, against all Republican motions calling for a renewed commitment. At the same time, she works with other party leaders to find a way to limit the ability of the minority party to offer such votes. But even if it manages to weaken this tactic, it does not change the more fundamental problem that Pelosi is facing.

Although the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Has become the face of the party, the reality is that she is not the one who has placed the Democrats in the majority. Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez and his young band of socialists are all districts already occupied by democrats. Her district has gone 78% for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and will never be in danger. It was the dozens of Democrats who overthrew Republican seats in constituencies, some of whom voted for President Trump, who gave the Democrats the majority.

It is therefore not surprising that Rep. Conor Lamb, a Democrat from Pennsylvania representing the constituents who voted for Trump, supported the ICE amendment by saying to Hill: "I vote for my district".

So, no matter how Pelosi changes the rules, if Pelosi wants to pass legislation backed by the Liberal base, she will have to convince the centrists to throw themselves in the water. This is where the bad experience of Obamacare comes in.

In 2009 and 2010, when Pelosi twisted the arms of the centrist Democrats to vote for Obamacare, she insisted that it would be a political winner once it was over. When she said, "we must pass the bill so that you know what it contains, far from the fog of controversy", it has been distorted as if it were calling people not to read the project as long as they did not vote for it. . In reality, she was trying to argue that Obamacare would become popular once it was passed.

We all know how it turned out. In 2010, Democrats lost 63 seats and control of the House. It would not be until 2018 that Obamacare could be perceived as a net winner of votes for Democrats, but before that, the career of dozens of Centrist Democrats had been destroyed because they had listened to Pelosi instead of their constituents.

While Pelosi is trying to bring different factions together in his caucus, Obamacare's memory will make it much more difficult to convince Democrats in alternate districts to vote for radical Liberal legislation.

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