Nobody cares?

Josh Marshall writes:

Exactly. Exactly.

In this post, Matt Yglesias gets at what's so wrong about pulling the plug now on reform and why a lot of people on the Hill aren't able to quite see this. Needing to make that complicated machine work people up there think about all the different bills, different iterations of bills, how there was never one "Obamacare", all the back and forth between House and Senate. But it's hard when you're living in that world to fully grasp that hardly anyone outside of DC has any idea what you're even talking about when you get into all that stuff. Or cares. It's just there was Obamacare. They worked on it all year. It got really messy. It was basically done. And then they just stopped. Read Matt's piece.

Matt writes: (emp add)

There are ... separate pieces of legislation. A House bill, a Senate bill, a Senate Finance Committee draft. And to professionals, there are important differences between these bills. House members voted for the House bill, but the Senate bill is something else entirely. Senate members voted for the Senate bill, but some amendments to make the tax provisions less-unfavorable to union members would be a whole separate bill. I understand all that. I write blog posts about it all the time.

But no normal people care about that even a little.

That's a remarkable dismissal of, well, basically everything. Why not pass an incredibly compromised bill that even Republicans will vote for? Because according to Yglesias, nobody cares about the detail.

To see Josh Marshall sharing that view is quite a surprise.


posted by Quiddity at 1/23/2010 07:36:00 PM