"Making the perfect the enemy of the good."

[ehrnst]

62. Petty?

And "undiluted" legislation is really a non-existent thing, because most legislation is written by committee, and marked up during the process.

With the exception of Sanders, who has attempted it with his M4A bill, which is undiluted by details on funding mechanisms or input from health policy experts, or likely anyone not on his staff. But that legislation is symbolic, as he has stated, so what is there to lose by refusing to allow anyone else to "dilute it" with improvements that would make it possible to get a reasonable CBO score? Like the "repeal Obamacare" votes during the Obama administration, legislating is easy when you know you won't have to actually put something through the process. Or just jump in afterwards to tack on a pure and undiluted amendment after all the nasty compromising and teamwork has been done by others.

The ACA is much better than what we had. I also know enough to know what I don't know about the process of getting the ACA into existence to judge how extensively "diluted" it was. And I know more than the average person about that, with my health policy background.

Those who came out against Trump's ACA repeal were also pressured by GOP governors, who needed that medicaid funding, and I think that had very, very significant weight. The CBO findings of the number of uninsured in 2020 was very damaging. Also, when you have the health care providers and the insurance industry against you, I think that weighs more in the GOP mindset than LGBTQs or POC - as we have seen in their cabinet member hearings... And hopefully you're reading my post this time... I am not saying grassroots efforts don't make a difference - they do. But as you said in your post, " they simply want to annihilate everyone even minutely to their left," so why do you ascribe so much power to the voices of the left in the decision of McCain, Collins and Murkowski and Rand Paul to vote against the Graham Cassidy Bill? That doesn't add up.

BTW, the 1964 Civil Rights act involved bribing and horse trading - and yes, some important compromises, not "very tiny ones," at least for the LGBTQ community. It wasn't about Johnson and Democrats wagging a finger at the Republicans and yelling, "this is the right thing to do, and go fuck yourself if you don't agree," which is something that many on the far left seem to think is the only ethical way to create legislation now.

Among the important compromises in the bill are exemptions from the employment discrimination prohibition of Title VII for businesses of less than 15 people, and the exemption from the Public Accommodations provision of Title II for small, owner-occupied motels and lodging establishments. Presumably, these exceptions exist for the benefit of racists who grew up in a racist system through no fault of their own. Congress might reasonably have concluded that forcing close contact between racial minorities and these racists might have been more trouble than it was worth. But these exemptions should have been time-limited; at this point, all but the oldest business owners spent their entire lives, or at least their adulthoods, in a nation were discrimination has clearly been against the law and public policy. The case for continued compromise of the policy is not obvious.

Another major gap in the Civil Rights Act is the lack of protection against discrimination of members of the LGBTQ community. Clearly, this was no oversight. The desegregation struggle was to some degree a Cold War propaganda effort. Fair treatment on the basis of race was a “cold war imperative,” and so too was controlling the potentially subversive effects of sexual minorities. Thus, the 1965 Immigration Act, a close cousin of the Civil Rights Act, eliminated discrimination on the basis of race in immigration law, but simultaneously clarified and strengthened a prohibition on gay and lesbian immigration. The Civil Rights Act makes little sense unless it recognizes a fundamental human dignity and equality. The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act closed unjustified gaps in the coverage of the original law, and the prohibition on gay immigration is gone. Continuing to allow discrimination against gays and lesbians in the Civil Rights Act is indefensible.

Perhaps the biggest compromise in the Civil Rights Act was its forward-looking, non-remedial nature. Congress recognized that there had been discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and federal programs for decades, at least, and, as a result, vast disparities between racial groups with respect to education, income and wealth. But it addressed that problem by trying to create a level playing field going forward. It expressly did not require affirmative action. And even its levelling of the playing field was incomplete; Title VII immunized “bona fine seniority” systems, even if whites benefitted because of pre-Act discrimination.

https://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/compromise-and-the-civil-rights-act-of-1964

If you are going to use history as a justification for your arguments, please educate yourself on it first.