According to Senate.gov, Republicans haven't held a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate since the 1920s. And, in fact, throughout the last Republican majority it was always the Senate where the best ideas got held up and watered down.
When it comes down to an ideological vote, you might as well count RINOs as Democrats. But even if all the recent GOP Senators had been red-state conservatives, the Republicans haven't had a supermajority in the Senate in decades.
So I've never really accepted the argument that Republicans had "full control" of the government during these majorities. Even if they'd had "full control" of their own members, the Republican majority never had numerical control of the Senate. Democrats could have filibustered virtually any measure without the help of a single Republican, and the GOP majority would have been powerless to stop them.
On the other hand, there are 60 votes in the Democrat majority today. In this case, Republicans truly are powerless to stop any bill in the Senate. Nevertheless, that majority is not robust enough to pass a public option in its healthcare bill, and it's even having problems with abortion language -- Democrat party planks.
And I don't want to hear the argument that Lieberman isn't really a Democrat. Even with 59 votes, the Democrat advantage in the Senate is still stronger than any Republican majority since the Great Depression. Besides, my point really isn't that Democrats have "full control" of anything so much as I want you to understand that the GOP never did either. Their majority was smaller.
Hopefully we're done hearing about how "Republicans never did anything about healthcare the whole time they had full control of the Senate." In fact, Republicans tried to fix a lot of things under their majorities during the Bush administration, but the premise that they ever had "full control" is simply incorrect.
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