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Michele Bachmann and Hannidate had a wankfest over the mere thought that reconciliation might be used to pass health-care reform. Isn't it part of America's legislative process? Maybe Bachmann was talking about herself when she said members of Congress were anti-American.

Hannity: So, is the San Francisco Speaker, is she off-script, or is the bipartisan meeting that the president is orchestrating just a sham?

…

Hannity: Can we believe them? Are they just being disingenuous?

Bachmann: Well, that’s the question that we need to have addressed, because the president only let John Boehner, the Republican leadership, know that he wanted a health care summit just an hour he went on national TV with Katie Couric to announce this is what he wanted to do. No heads up, in effect. Then John Boehner sent a letter to President Obama, asking questions, ‘Are we going to start over? Or are we working off of your Democrat plan?’ The president was real clear – he said he plans to pass the Democrat plan, Robert Gibbs went to the microphone, said the same thing. And then as you said, Speaker Pelosi’s Number One health-care negotiator in the House said they’ve got a legislative trick, and they know exactly how they’re going to pass their plan. That’s after the president’s invitation. If they’re already saying they’re going to pass their bill, then what is this for, this summit?

…

Hannity: All right, so are you looking specifically for a promise? In other words, Mr. President, do you promise – and I saw the letter that John Boehner and Eric Cantor sent to the president – do you need a promise or a commitment that he will not use the reconciliation process before it would be wise enough to sit down?

Bachmann: I think the best negotiation would be one where the president says, ‘I will not use the reconciliation’ – the legislative trick, in the Democrats’ own vernacular. And where he says we’ll start from scratch, we’ll start over with a blank sheet of paper, and we’ll start new with our ideas and we’ll truly come together, with cameras, both sides, and come to a discussion. That’s really what the American people expect and that would be the best outcome.

Maybe Congress should just pass Paul Ryan's whacked out budget too.

IOKIYAR. Isn't that always the case? Ronald Reagan used reconciliation along with Clinton. George Bush used it to pas his tax cuts. And another of the wanker elitists is Judd Gregg who attacks it now but used it in 1994 for Newt and wanted to use it against ANWAR.

In 1994, he was a freshman Senator using budget reconciliation to move pieces of Newt Gingrich's Contract With America through the Senate. In 2005, he argued that budget reconciliation should be used to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

And of course, George W. Bush made great use of the procedure with the help of Ben Nelson.

On May 26, 2001, Nelson was one of a dozen Democrats to support president George W. Bush's Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001: the massive tax cut package that defined the administration's plans for job growth. The bill was passed using reconciliation -- meaning it wasn't subject to a Democratic filibuster -- and received the support of 58 Senators. Two years later, Bush had introduced a second tax-cut package, this one entitled The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. That too was passed through reconciliation with Nelson's vote proving even more critical.

Clearly, passing this health-care bill is just the beginning, because it doesn't really contain strong regulatory powers. It was pulled under reconciliation rules, and Obama reportedly will try to introduce it later:

WASHINGTON -- A Democratic plan for new federal power over health insurance rates was dropped Thursday from the final health care bill, squeezed out by the way the Democrats are pushing the bill through Congress.

Rolled out with fanfare just weeks ago, the Democratic plan was a response to double-digit rate increases proposed by health insurance companies in California and elsewhere.

It was first proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., then picked up by President Barack Obama.

It would have given the federal government the power to reject proposed rate increases. It also would have allowed the secretary of health and human services to order insurance companies to give back part of premiums if the government decided that the companies spent too much of their incomes on salaries or advertising.

After a marathon session in the Senate where amendment after amendment was offered by the Republicans and vote after vote shot them down, it appears that the reconciliation package will head back to the House after a small tweak to the student loan provisions.

In inimitable fashion, the New York Times is playing this as a big win for the GOP, MSNBC has sent two news alerts to my iPhone about it, and Twitter has lit up with the concern of many who are anxiously watching the final chapter of the health care reform saga.

Then there are those hopefuls who figure striking 16 lines of language relating to Pell grants will be a swinging open door for re-introduction of the public option.

Here's my prediction. They'll amend the bill to remove the 16 lines of Byrd rule violations. They'll vote the rest of the GOP amendments down. They'll have a vote sometime today on the reconciliation package and send it back to the House. The House will then vote on Monday for the revised package, which contains non-controversial provisions.

Why wouldn't the Senate add a public option provision since they have to send it to the House anyway? Because it's doubtful they'd get the requisite number of House votes, given an escalation in rhetoric to threat level red. Let's face it: would YOU invite more controversy in the toxic wasteland that is Washington, DC today?

Republicans will still play the Sunday shows like they won something huge, and the threat level will rise because the wingers are too stupid to actually figure out the reconciliation package has nothing in it relating to abortion, death panels, or socialism. It will be noisy, and get noisier, but in the end...it's a blip. Health care reform is the law of the land. This is just a tweaker package, not a big deal at all. A one-day delay in sending to the President, but still, a blip.

It was entertaining to watch the parade of stupid on CSPAN, though. As the night wore on, the Republicans got a little more shrill and a lot more stupid. Gotta love marathon voting sessions, especially ones where the Democrats actually show some backbone for a change.

Remember this confrontation?

Chris Matthews attacks Alan Grayson and accuses him of pandering to the netroots because he believes the reconciliation process can be used to get a health care bill passed.

Transcript:

MATTHEWS: This is the problem, Congressman. Every night we deal with two worlds, the real world of Congress that has to do things and get things passed, and this outside world represented by the netroots and people like yourself, who play this game.

GRAYSON: What are you talking about? I sit in meetings with the Democratic caucus with meetings every week! I’m telling you, this is what we’re talking about. This is what the leadership is telling us.

MATTHEWS: We’ll make a side bet that it’s not going to happen. Congressman Alan Grayson, a true believer that you can get things done by willing it to get done! [laughs]

The Mike Thomas Blog writes:

I would like to see Chris Matthews publicly concede that Grayson was right during their hotly contested exchange on Hardball in January.

Say it Chris: I was wrong. He was right.

Grayson argued that health care would pass through the reconciliation process. This caused Matthews to launch into a five-minute tirade berating Grayson as an amateur pandering to the netroots. It was classic I-can-yell-louder-than-you, I-can-talk-fast-than-you Matthews moment...read on

The bill hasn't been passed yet by the Senate, but it probably will and then we'll see what CM has to say. If anything.

Alan Grayson rules.

Greg Sargent reports:

Senator Bernie Sanders, in a brief interview in the Capitol just now, confirmed to me that he’s willing to commit to introducing an amendment that would add the public option to the Senate bill’s reconciliation fix.

This is important, because as far fetched as this seems, if this amendment is introduced, a vote on it would be very hard for the Senate Dem leadership to block. The only thing that could stop it from happening, according to Senate expert Robert Dove, is for the parliamentarian to rule that it’s not germane to the Senate bill somehow — something that seems unlikely...read on

As Adam Green is launching another initiative for the PCCC, we know the House doesn't trust the Senate at all, but the process seems to finally be winding down.

Ryan Grim reports that the public option is still viable, but he says it's a matter of will and not votes.

The public option faces its last stand. With more than 40 senators publicly willing to vote for a health care reform reconciliation package that includes the option, the opportunity to reinsert it into the final bill has never been greater, though the battle is nearly over without having been fought.

--

That balance of power gives House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) extraordinary leverage of a historical nature. Pelosi, however, has yet to concede in negotiations that it is the obligation of the House to go first. And the deal that is being reached is driven largely by the White House. But both the Senate and the White House need Pelosi. And the House, of course, has already passed a health care bill with a public option.

If the House does move first, the Senate would essentially face an up-or-down vote on whatever Pelosi sends over. Durbin was asked by HuffPost if he would whip a reconciliation package from the House that included a public option. An analysis of past statements and positions taken by members of the Democratic caucus indicates that there could plausibly be 53 votes for a public option and perhaps several more.

Durbin, in response to the question, said at first that it was hypothetical, but then answered, "I think there will come a time when we reach agreement on what the reconciliation package includes, with the understanding that any changes in the House or Senate could slow down or stop the process."

So whatever comes from the House, that's what you will whip?

"That's basically it," he said. "I hope that what comes from the House is what we agree on going into this debate."

--

UPDATE: The news that the Senate parliamentarian told Senate Republicans that the bill must become law before any amendments can be made through reconciliation alters the equation if true. The House, however, could still pass the Senate bill into law and then send the Senate a reconciliation fix with a public option. The Senate could torpedo that legislation without concern that no reform package at all would get passed, giving the Senate added leverage. The underlying dynamic, however, remains unchanged: In the next few days, as the White House and congressional leaders meet to hash out the way forward, the votes appear to exist to include a public option. It's only a matter of will.

It appears that Dick Durbin is not going to risk the entire bill because of the public option.

Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged Wednesday that liberals may be asked to oppose any amendment, including one creating a public option, to ensure a smooth ride for the bill. “We have to tell people, ‘You just have to swallow hard’ and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen,” Durbin, who supports a public option, told reporters. “We have to move this forward. We know the Republicans are likely to offer a lot of amendments, and some of them may be appealing to Democrats, but we have to urge them to stick with the bill.”

The PCCC is running a campaign against Durbin at this time and asking members of the Senate to not turn their back on it.

Don't you love how the Republicans concern troll the Democratic Party election prospects? As if they're all so worried about whether or not the Democratic Party will retain their majority. One of my husband's less-than-genius friends made the mistake of parroting those GOP talking points to us and even he had to concede (after we pushed back with that greatest liberal weapon of reality) that if the GOP really thought that the Dems could lose their majority, they'd keep their big mouths shut and let them implode. The truth is--and it's obvious to anyone who thinks about it--they know that passing health care reform will help the Democratic Party and they're trying to keep that from happening with all their obfuscations and meaningless memes like reconciliation equating to "jamming it through Congress".

Normally, when I do research on post on happenings in the Middle East, I check in on Juan Cole's blog. He's the go-to guy on Mid East affairs. But Juan did a post yesterday injecting another well-needed bit of reality into the health care debate:

The invented Republican/ Foxy News talking point du jour is that the Democrats intend to 'ram health care reform down our throats' even though 'the American people don't want it.'

Bzzz. That's just wrong! First of all, when there is a landslide triumph for a party as there was in November, 2008, for the victor to actually govern and legislate is not 'ramming' anything down anyone's 'throat.' It is doing what the people asked you to do. Obama campaigned on this issue, and presumably that fact had not escaped the electorate's notice.

Just so we don't forget, if we sized the lower 48 states according to their population, this is what the Democratic victory looked like, according to cartophilia:

So it is that little tiny red thing that is talking about 'ramming' down 'throats.'

Second, 80 percent of Americans in a recent ABC/Post poll want to prohibit limits on pre-existing conditions, and 72 percent want to impose an employer mandate. Some 63 percent favor some form of public health care reform. The same proportion, 63%, want president Obama to keep trying to pass a reform. A majority, 56%, want everyone to be covered. The allegation that the 'public doesn't want it' is an artificial creation of millions of dollars in disinformation money purveyed by the pharmaceutical companies through the US Chamber of Commerce and their bought-and-paid-for congressmen and senators. If a pollster explains to a member of the public what is actually in the bill, Americans like most of the provisions, as Ezra Klein says.

Hmmm....so that would be 180° different from what McConnell said. What are the chances of that? Cole reminds us of what the Republicans "jammed" through on us:

1. The illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, ending the lives of thousands of service members and millions of civilians, adding trillions of dollars to the deficit, allowing widespread corruption by private companies, some of whom benefited the administration directly;
2. Torture, not just of terrorists but of innocent citizens too, ending habeas corpus and bringing down the reputation of the country among the global community;
3. Warrantless wiretappings of Americans;
4. The gutting of regulations in the financial and mortgage industries, paving way for the worst economy since the Great Depression;
5. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy, born on the backs of the middle class--passed, by the way, through reconciliation;
6. Abandonment of our troops in Afghanistan, allowing the leadership of the Taliban and al Qaeda to resurge.

So the question for Mitch McConnell & Friends is who do you really think is "jamming" whom?

Greg Sargent finds some interesting poll results on reconciliation.

With the spin war shifting to a battle over the meaning and implications of “reconciliation,” there will be more and more argument over what polls indicate about the public’s attitude toward the tactic.

Here’s some more fodder for this argument: A new batch of polls by the nonpartisan Research 2000 indicates that in key states, majorities are okay with the use of reconciliation — if the question is worded in a certain way.

The polls — sent over by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, DFA and Credo, which sponsored them — ask the question this way:

If the Senate passes a health care reform bill that you consider to be beneficial to your family, would you object to the Senate’s use of “reconciliation” rules to pass that bill with a majority vote, or not?

In Nevada, 55% wouldn’t object; in Illinois, 67% wouldn’t object; in Washington state, 65% wouldn’t object; in Missouri, 58% wouldn’t object; in Virginia, 60% wouldn’t object; in Iowa, 66% wouldn’t object; and in North Dakota, 53% wouldn’t object.

The key here, obviously, is that the question casts the legislation as “beneficial to your family,” which of course makes it more likely that people will be okay with using reconciliation to pass it.

The PCCC is doing a great job getting this polling done. David Axlerod whacked the Republicans for the whining on reconciliation too.

"The American people ... all they want is an up or down vote. They want to move on, have the vote, let's finish the debate. The American people say let the vote be held, let the majority rule and let's move on," Axelrod said.

"Let's move forward," he repeated several times.

I was out all day and missed most of the reaction to Obama's suggested health-care plan. (Although I did learn from the Washington Post that this reheated version of the Senate bill is the White House team's idea of "going big." Heaven help us, I'd hate to see what "going small" looks like.)

From jumping around the blogs tonight, here's a roundup of some of the more interesting stuff.

From Think Progress:

The Obama plan maintains key elements of the Senate proposal but also incorporates stronger anti-fraud provisions and allows the federal government to review insurance rate hikes. On a call with reporters Pfeiffer insisted that the administration has not determined “on which path to move forward with”, but the bill’s substance suggests that Obama is hoping to bypass a prolonged-Senate debate and use the reconciliation process to fix the Senate bill and convince reluctant House progressives to pass the Senate legislation. “The American people deserve up or down vote on health reform,”Pfeiffer said. “We can get an up or down vote if opposition decides to take extraordinary steps of filibustering health reforms.”

But it’s unclear if progressive House members will embrace the new compromise. While the bill addresses House members’ affordability concerns, increases the excise tax thresholds and completely closes the donut hole in Medicare Part D, the legislation does not include a public option, retains the Senate bill’s state-based exchanges and keeps the start date for most reforms at 2014. (Obama’s plan also retains the Senate’s abortion compromise and most other core provisions).

And I know you're dying to read the reaction from the National Right to Life committee, right?

In its statement, the National Right to Life committee said that the president’s proposal “limits rights of Americans of all ages to use their own money to save their own lives.”

Burke Balch, the director of the National Right to Life Committee’s Powell Center of Ethics, likened the president’s plan to imposing a limit on the cost of restaurant meals.

“It is as though a government, concerned about the high cost of restaurant food, imposed a price limit of $5 per meal, and then asserted that for those who like their restaurant food, nothing will force them to change their eating habits,” the statement said. “The reality, of course, is that restaurants would be unable to afford to offer meals at prices below the cost of their ingredients. Consequently, about all restaurant-goers would be able to get would be fast food.”

Yes, because unlike health care, it's not as if you couldn't buy food and cook it yourself. (Try not to think about it, it'll just make your head hurt.)

Lambert, as usual, cuts to the chase:

NOTE: And this part is truly weird. You know the 31 million number that keeps getting tossed around? I always that was due mostly to Medicaid expansion --- moving the opportunity to get medical care after losing all your assets, like your house, up the income ladder -- but no. Right in the first paragraph:

"The President's [cough] Option" -- sorry, "Proposal" -- makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, reducing premium costs for tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage today. This helps over 31 million Americans afford health care who do not get it today – and makes coverage more affordable for many more.

It's a tax cut!? Are Republican talking points truly the only ponies left in the stable?

I'm not even gonna try to gild that particular lily.

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Fox News' Megyn Kelly this morning, on the supposedly "opinion free" and "fair and balanced" "news show" America Live:

Kelly: Moments ago, at the White House briefing, reporters asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about reports the Democrats are ready to use the so-called "nuclear option". This would mean forcing a health-care reform bill through with only fifty-one votes in the Senate as opposed to sixty.

Here is Gibbs, refusing to rule that out.

Kelly then played a video of Gibbs trying to explain that the reconciliation option is always there, and always has been. (Indeed, it would require a suspension of Senate rules to take it off the table.)

Then she brought on Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, who similarly tried to explain that reconciliation is always an option if the forthcoming summit on health care does not produce a bipartisan agreement, and that taking it off the table is not an option. Kelly wasn't listening.

But that, of course, is only the half the problem. The other is that reconciliation is not a "nuclear option" -- it's a normative part of Senate rules. And its use simply underscores the fact that the Constitution did not create a Senate in which legislation may only pass by sixty votes. It created one in which fifty-one was sufficient.

It's only been in recent years, through Republican abuse of the filibuster, that sixty votes has become the standard level of support to get anything passed. Reconciliation is the one process that circumvents the filibuster and negates such abuse.

Moreover, as Media Matters explains, the term "nuclear option" refers to a Republican plan to do away with the filibuster altogether, threatened back when Democrats used filibuster threats to hold up the Bush administration's extremist slate of judicial appointments. That's hardly what Democrats are planning with health-care reform.

Indeed, as the New York Times pointed out last year, reconciliation has always been a popular option with Republicans in getting key pieces of legislation passed.

But there are a couple of problems for Republicans as they push back furiously against the idea, chief of which is the fact that they used the process themselves on several occasions, notably when enacting more than $1 trillion in tax cuts in 2001.

That means critics can have a field day lampooning Republicans and asking them — as Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, did repeatedly the other day — why reconciliation was such a good idea when it came to giving tax cuts to millionaires but such a bad one when it comes to trying to provide health care to average Americans.

The record is also replete with past statements by Republicans such as Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the party’s leader on budget issues, praising the logic of reconciliation.

“We are using the rules of the Senate here,” Mr. Gregg said in 2005 as he fought off Democratic complaints that reconciliation was wrongly being employed to block filibusters against opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. “Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don’t think so.”

But he and other Republicans, with some Democrats concurring, say that using reconciliation to accomplish Mr. Obama’s sweeping objectives would distort the intent of a procedure intended mainly to lower the deficit, not restructure the national economy.

Hahahahahaha! Good one! As though Bush's tax cuts -- which predictably had the result of widening the gap between rich and poor in this country -- didn't represent a fundamental restructuring of the national economy.

Indeed, Ronald Reagan used the reconciliation process in 1981 to pass his tax cuts -- which had a similar effect.

But when Democrats go that route, they're suddenly going "nuclear."

Right.

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