Now the folks over at Powerline are trying to execute the Republican strategy of making the reconciliation process a big part of the debate over passing health care reform. I don’t blame them for making the effort, but I still find it amusing. The Republicans are forgetting that the Senate health care bill passed on Christmas Eve. What the Democrats are going to attempt is to get the House to pass the Senate version of the bill under completely ordinary rules. If the House does that, the health care reforms will have passed without any use of reconciliation rules. So, at that point, health care reform will have passed under the ordinary rules in both the House and the Senate. There will be nothing to complain about from a procedural point of view. The bill will have passed at the normal majority vote in the House and the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.
That is how our Republic works. We have elections and our Congress votes.
What Powerline and the Republicans are objecting to is the use of the budget reconciliation process to make some fairly minor tweaks to a bill that has already passed through the Senate. Their talking points suggest that these tweaks represent a “nuclear weapon” and are an unprecedented power grab. But all we’re doing is tinkering around the edges of something that has already passed.
It’s a sad, impotent argument, and I’m very gratified to see the Republicans in this pathetic condition.
