Maybe I am horribly out of the loop, but considering the bill already passed the Senate, if they aren't going to be able to pass something revised pretty quickly and pretty surely, the house members would have to be complete fucktards to not go ahead and pass the senate version and maybe make a deal to do a little tweaking through reconciliation later. You wanna look like a bunch of incompetent morons? Just let the biggest thing you've all been preaching about for a year fall off with no results. That fall out would have to be a bigger negative for the members of the house than some minor ideological disagreements with some of its contents.

From both a political practicality measure of not wanting to appear completely incompetent and an ideological point of view of accomplishing much more than nothing I see no way the democrats let this thing totally tank.

You really think an imperfect bill is a harder sell back home than a complete and total failure to accomplish a damn thing?

I think that in large part it is a healthy reaction to one party control, you know the whole balance of powers bit. Normally I would think that this would be for the best, but right now I'm not so sure. It would be nice if this sparked some bi-partisanship, even if it's out of necessity, rather than one party always voting one way and the other the other way. I hope this is what starts to happen.

Separation of powers has nothing to do with political parties.

I know, but the concept of a balance of power does.

Stick to that if you want, but there isn't one party control now. How much balance do you need when a handful of 'moderate" Senators can logjam everything to butter their own bread? People tend to forget (or ignore) that Congress is a collection of individual interests, not a national body. That's why everyone thinks legislators in all those other districts are douchebags.

Nevermind the fact that this is a state election, not a national opinion referendum, and Massachusetts elected GOP governors from 1991-2007.