On the one hand, it’s the job of the unions to look out for their members. With the White House heavily promoting the Cadillac tax since the minute they got into office, it was going to be exceptionally difficult to beat the excise tax back.

But the reason that so many supported Richard Trumka’s tough stance (“We won’t support the bill if it doesn’t have a public option in it”) was because they were deeply affected by the outcome of the health care bill, whether they were in a union or not, and they rallied around his leadership. Without that broad support of the public cheering them on, they would not have had the ability to move the White House at all.

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Perhaps the most consequential decision in the health care negotiations between the House and Senate may have been made yesterday without much fanfare. The decision was to drop the House’s employer mandate and go with the Senate’s much weaker “free rider” provision. This decision will result in 5 million fewer uninsured individuals gaining coverage because [...]

Ed. note: You can find our earlier threads, liveblogs from day one and two, and the rest of FDL’s extensive team coverage at our dedicated Prop 8 trial hub.

You may think that House Democrats warning that the health care bill is in a lot of trouble reflects nothing more than posturing. Why is Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying that the bill might go down on the first pass and then return to the House before it passes?

Consider the math.

Thankfully, it looks like the National Freakout about the undiebomber, which lasted for the better part of a month, is finally over. But, unfortunately, it looks like you have to be out of government to have a sane perspective on it.

You can find our earlier threads, liveblogs from day one and two, and the rest of FDL’s extensive team coverage at our dedicated Prop 8 trial hub.

The hearings on the financial crisis are getting underway, but what good will it really do? Will regulation fix the system, or do we need to radically rethink it? We ask Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and the new The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation and of the book Meltdown, and Daniel Gross, Newsweek columnist. Join us live on the Web at 12:30!

I’m going to be so bold as to say they can work with us. And we can work with them. But they have to do something first — prove they are not tools of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. Fight the banks!

DEFAZIO: I think the Senate bill is a disaster. I mean, anybody who’s watching this noticed that insurance industry stocks has gone up since the Senate bill passed, because It gives them a lot of new customers and no meaningful controls. They took out my language stripping the industry of the anti-trust immunity. They established meaningless, spineless weak state exchanges instead of a national exchange.