They were trying to get Republican votes so that the law would be bipartisan. In the end it passed on a party line vote, so maybe the compromises were a mistake...
The parties weren't yet ideologically sorted. The Democratic majority included dozens of members of the Blue Dog coalition, a conservative group who (among other things) didn't support healthcare reform.
Also the us Congress is blocked by the senate needing 60 votes/supporters to reach cloture on every single bill, except the once per year thing that got the bbb passed. So it's very easy to block the other side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...
No question the executive has had its powers extended beyond the original vision, but I don't often see the same criticism of the judiciary. Judges are more akin to a monarch than the US executive (courtroom is their kingdom), with very little recourse for ordinary citizens.
Except judges can't do anything proactively and are forced to rely on the executive to enforce their decisions and the legislative to fund them. Really, they're absolutely nothing like a monarch. Especially compared to the guy who appoints all the secretaries, commands the military, and decides foreign policy.
Complaints about "judicial activism", or complaining about "judges that go to far, have been blasted everywhere since the at least the 90s so more than my adult life, at least from what I can remember growing up in the middle of the USA.
Reminds me of a scare I had when I was dating my now wife. We were discussing our families and turns out our mothers had the same first name... and their maiden surnames were the same. It's a fairly common Irish name and there was no traceable relation but talk about a potential freakout! Made for a great bit during my father-in-law's speech at our wedding.
In the part of Scotland I come from there was a distinct lack of variation in surnames - so much so that people would use so-called "tee-names" to identify different families
e.g. My ancestor David Wood had the family tee-name "King":
I'm glad it worked out for you. It is a funny story, though, so don't be mad at me for chuckling a little bit. (I guess the guests at your wedding did so, too.)
A friend of my mother's has to twin sons who married two women who had not only the same first name but also worked at the same company. Both ladies took their husbands' names, so they both had the same names. I imagine it must have been both funny and confusing.
When I last worked as a sysadmin, our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees, so the idea of having two employees with the same name drives me a little bit crazy. (Even worse, though, it did not use FOREIGN KEY constraints but TRIGGERs. I am not sure about performance implications, but from an aesthetical perspective, this is just wrong.)
our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees
As someone with a common first name and common surname, this drives me bananas.
I still get emails from my graduate university to email: first.last@uni.edu meant for some undergraduate in a sea of 50k students, and have to reply that I've had that email for 20 years and they have the wrong person with a very common name.
I have to admit I found the very concept of using a value that could change as a primary repulsive from an aesthetic point of view. It's just bad database design.
Still, I feel for you. My primary concern, though, was that it made life more complicated for me. But email adresses were separate from ERP user names, and we did not have two employees with the same name, so first.last@company.com was good enough for our purposes.
