Convenient excuses. This has been the reasoning used to justify Dems doing nothing for decades. Show me the effort or don’t talk about desire.
Not having the votes isn’t a convenient excuse, it’s reality. I literally just gave you major legislation passed by the Democrats the last time they had control of Congress and POTUS. You’re not asking for effort, you’re asking for them to pass stuff and that requires more votes.
There are plenty of great progressive policy proposals that are supported by large swaths of the Democratic Party. Healthcare, ubi, abortion rights, immigration reform, etc. If they had to votes to pass shit and didn’t, you’d have a solid point. But they don’t, and there’s plenty of evidence that if they had the votes they would pass more legislation. Can you point to a time in the last 50 years when the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in congress w control of POTUS, and didn’t pass any major legislation?
I don’t take issue with your assertion that they don’t have the votes based on the way they play the game but I don’t agree that Manchin / Sinema / Lieberman are sufficient explanations for their lack of effort. There’s always a convenient scapegoat for failing to do what they promised but at some point they have to own that failure instead of blaming it on a couple people.
Also, the ACA is not a major piece of legislation to anyone outside of Congress. It’s a minor improvement over the completely unchecked shit show we had before but it is fundamentally no different than what we have always had. You’re framing it like they were so close to offering a public option but my recollection of those events is that they cut that from the proposal almost immediately and with little to no negotiation. That’s not fighting it’s letting your opponent dictate terms. Same goes with any number of other strategies and pieces of legislation from the same period or Bidens first 2 years. Dems could have gotten rid of the filibuster and actually fought for progress but they decided not to. That was party leadership’s decision, not Joe Manchin. People don’t give a shit what Dems say they support because they won’t even force a vote on most of it, much less actually implement it.
