Rachel Maddow calls out the Republicans for saying that Democrats passing the health reform bill through reconciliation is the same as the nuclear option. And as she notes, they are more than well aware that they are lying since they constantly threatened to use the nuclear option and change the rules of the Senate when they wanted to get Bush's judicial appointments confirmed.
Maddow: What's going on here is a deliberate attempt on the part of Republicans to define nuclear down -- to conflate these two totally separate things to demonize the way that Democrats have to pass health reform right now. By calling it the nuclear option even though the nuclear option is a real thing in the Senate, and this isn't that -- it has nothing to do with that. Perhaps the reason that Republicans are so unwilling to call this what it is, reconciliation is because they have a really long record of using reconciliation.
As Rachel notes budget reconciliation is how the health care system has been formed in the United States already and Republicans used reconciliation to pass the Bush tax cuts, twice. And it's been used to pass things like COBRA and SCHIP. No sooner did I turn her show off tonight and guess who was helping conflate the term reconciliation with the nuclear option? You've got it... ClusterFox.
