Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): The extraordinarily brief window in 2009 when there was a Democratic super majority was spent working on the ACA. As nice as it would have been for every Democratic platform policy to have been brought to fruition, it was not possible. Why are we pretending otherwise? https://twitter.com/SxarletRed/status/1466437409277677580
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): The more I think about this, the angrier that I get. 2009 is not so long ago that we should be getting into revisionist history about it already, and if people are unsure about how things went down, there are plenty of us around to ask.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): Moving massive policy requires political will on top of political power and it comes with consequences.
So putting aside that the “super majority” was kaput as soon as Ted Kennedy‘s brain tumor sidelined him, it took the might of that majority MONTHS of fighting to move the ACA.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): That single bill ate that year alive. And oh man did it come with consequences.
First came the tea party, A crypto white supremacist movement that was the direct and spiritual forbear of QAnon.
Then Democrats lost Congress, badly.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): And it wasn’t just the usual “incumbent president loses seats in the midterm“ thing. It was a direct repudiation of the ACA by white supremacy and its foot soldiers.
That allowed the Senate to grind the process of appointing judges to the federal bench to a standstill.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): And that was a direct path to Trump.
If the supermajority that wasn’t had focused on codifying Roe rather than the ACA, we would probably have 100 million uninsured Americans right now, and Romney would have won in 2012. We’d have President Paul friggin Ryan right now.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): And instead of 80 different votes to overturn the ACA, and a half dozen major litigation efforts to do the same, it would have been 80 different votes to overturn the codification of Roe, and the same Federalist Society loaded federal bench, the same unbalanced SCOTUS.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): And we’d end up losing the codification AND we’d have no access to health insurance or expanded Medicaid AND the rest of the mind breaking Republican agenda crammed straight down our throats like geese having their livers fattened.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): Why didn’t the Democrats do _____ in 2009?
Because people were holding spaghetti dinners and bake sales to pay for cancer treatment and were still having to declare bankruptcy WITH insurance and millions of us couldn’t get it at all, at any price and that was a burning priority.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): And during a pandemic that has made millions of Americans sick and disabled for the long term and 770,000+ dead, to even contemplate that addressing healthcare wasn’t a suitable number one priority is…
There aren’t really words for it.
Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks): The question cannot be “why didn’t Democrats do ____?”
The question must be, until the work is done, “how do we move white supremacists out of the way so that the progress of the majority of Americans want can happen without a reactive movement ruining it immediately after?”