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Yesterday at the big White House healthcare rollout, we got this:
President Obama, beginning his final push for a health care overhaul, called Wednesday for Congress to allow an “up or down vote” on the measure, and sketched out an ambitious — and, some Democrats said, unrealistic — timetable for his party to pass a bill on its own within weeks.
Why have we all adopted this “up or down vote” language? Doesn’t it obscure the real point, mainly that what we want is just a vote, period? The whole point of a filibuster, after all, is to extend debate so that the Senate never gets to vote on the bill in question. Shouldn’t Obama simply be saying that “we deserve a vote” or some such thing? Wouldn’t that make more sense to the average viewer?
