You can help save the ACA (aka Obamacare) in the Senate by helping to foil the Republican efforts to smuggle the bill through the Senate unseen.
The Indivisible folks have a website that lets you file an amendment to exempt yourself from the strictures of the Senate’s version of Trumpcare. Whatever the GOP bill ends up proposing, you can help stall its progress by asking your Senator to file and debate an amendment exempting you, as an individual, from its (very mean) provisions. You can also add other comments, which will be entered into the Congressional Record to say why you think Trumpcare is an abomination.
So, in the interests of all of us, help run out the clock. Go forth and ask for an exemption — just for you.
Link here.
Please share widely!
I’m pretty sure legislative provisions applying to a named individual are not allowed and I assume would be ruled out of order.
So do you have a different strategy to prevent the gutting of the ACA, or are you good with it?
I do!
If this general strategy is legit (and I have no idea), than you don’t need individual names. After all, there are
50 states,
3,007 counties,
19,354 incorporated places (cities, towns, hamlets, etc.),
366 different birthdays,
100+ different years of birth,
and so forth. An amendment could exempt all people who meet any one of those categories, any one of the subsets within that category. That’s 23,000 amendments right there.
Sounds suspiciously like… representation. I guess we could try that…
How about actual amendments designed to make it better? I’m too much a parliamentarian to engage in dilatory games and my point is you won’t have all the debate on each one you suggest. The presiding officer will rule it out of order and that will be that.
That would be a good idea if the bill was being brought through regular channels. As it is, the Democratic Senators will be going into debate without knowing what’s in the bill, so this strategy makes sense.
That’s not quite true. There may be no prior warning, but once something hits the floor it is in the hand of every Senator.
And how much time will that leave the Senators, their staffers, relevant experts, analysts, and others the opportunity to study the bill and consider the complex interactions, and then draft amendments that make careful, dare I say surgical changes to the language to improve it?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
It has now been released. They can make amendments to strike the entire enacting clause for all I care, but I still say the previous suggestion screams dilatory. Besides, did I miss where filibustering wasn’t an option here?
Yes, it seems you did miss the part about the filibuster not being available. The Republicans are using the reconciliation process to pass this bill, which means they need only 50 votes. Also, as the NYT reports, they are also going to try to limit debate to 20 hours. Sometimes being dilatory is being patriotic.
OK, but I still want real amendments and debates, not games that are going to be ruled out of order before the Senator even gets the words our of his mouth.
Real debates will only happen in that chamber once Mitch McConnell loses his majority
It’s my opinion that every single amendment suggested above would make the bill better. It’s a bad bill. Exempting even some people from it make it a better bill.
P.S. How do I know it’s a bad bill? Great question! I’ll tell you. The Republicans have been angling to repeal Obamacare for 7 years now. They’ve never proposed a dang thing that I thought would make it better, and loads of things that I think would make it worse. Their bill is a secret now, and jeebs, if they thought that liberals would be even intrigued, they’d be sharing and gaining momentum. But they’re not. So until the GOP actively proves otherwise, it’s a bad bill. Ergo, exempting people from it is a good thing ™.
“Pretty sure”…?
If you’re referring to a ‘bill of attainder’ which (I believe) is expressly forbid by the Constitution, that’s not what this is: Attainder would be for congress to name an individual, decide that something that individual did was a crime, and decree punishment.
A private bill, on the other hand, which might exempt someone from tax liability, for instance, or grant them a visa, is not only wholly permissible, but common.
But they have to be sponsored by a Senator (in this instance). I don’t believe J Random Citizen can ‘file an amendment’ as it says above. So what you are doing is asking the Senate to file an amendment on your behalf.
Done. People in DC are tuned into numbers. We need to flood them with this.