Clinton and Donna Shalala over closed-door meetings related to the health care plan. The AAPS sued to gain access to the list of members of the task force. In 1997, Judge Royce C. Lamberth found in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded $285,864 to the AAPS for legal costs; Lamberth also harshly criticized the Clinton administration and Clinton aide Ira Magaziner in his ruling. Subsequently, in 1999, a federal appeals court overturned the award and the initial findings on the basis that Magaziner and the administration had not acted in bad faith. Defeat In August 1994, Democratic Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell introduced a compromise proposal that would have delayed requirements of employers until 2002 and exempted small businesses. However, "even with Mitchell’s bill, there were not enough Democratic Senators behind a single proposal to pass a bill, let alone stop a filibuster." A few weeks later, Mitchell announced that his compromise plan was dead and that health care reform would have to wait at least until the next Congress. The defeat was embarrassing for the administration, emboldened Republicans, and contributed to the notion that Hillary Clinton was a "big-government liberal" as decried by conservative opponents. The 1994 mid-term election became, in the opinion of one media observer, a "referendum on big government – Hillary Clinton had launched a massive health-care reform plan that wound up strangled by its own red tape". In that 1994 election, the Republican revolution, led by Newt Gingrich, gave the GOP control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time since the 83rd Congress of 1953–1954, ending prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul. Comprehensive health care reform in the United States was not seriously considered or enacted by Congress until Barack Obama's election in 2008, and the country remains without universal health care. Controversy in retrospect and perspective In 2004, as a US senator from New York, Hillary Clinton argued in The New York Times that the current health care system is unsustainable, and she offered several solutions. Her article also mentioned areas of agreement with onetime opponent Newt Gingrich, and likewise, Gingrich has expressed agreement with Clinton on some aspects of health care, including a bill to modernize medical record keeping. In 2005, referring to her previous efforts at health care reform, she said, "I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan