A Baby Step In The Right Direction

The Senate finally passed their ridiculously scaled down aid to states bill which is partially offset with future cuts to food stamps.  It now heads to the House for a vote and hopefully Nancy Pelosi is smart enough to call an emergency session to send a signal to voters that helping them is more important than their recess break. 

In the end Republican Senators Collins and Snowe practically wrote the bill and then agreed to vote for cloture. Thing of it is that's what was always going to happen. So the question is what would Majority Leader Harry Reid and the rest of the Democrats lost had they brought up the bigger versions of the bill and allowed votes on them which probably wouldn't have passed cloture?

Absolutely nothing.

But what they would have gained would have been a national audience watching Republicans argue against sending aid to states to keep teachers, firemen and cops. Yeah I know the Republicans would have argued they just want it paid for but its like the Democrats haven't seen the polling where the American people care more about the economy than the deficit.

To be honest the more they make Republicans make the argument about paying to offset bailing out Main Street the better because just people don't care about those details, what they want to know is are you going to help them or not.

Yes or No?

But Senate Democrats seem unwilling to make Republicans and a few people in their own party make tough votes. And that's what's going to end up hurting them the most in the midterms IMO.