From an article in the New York Times today on Obama’s “summit”:
Democrats were talking openly about pushing it through Congress on a simple majority vote using a controversial parliamentary maneuver…
From a column by Floyd Norris in the New York Times today, discussing passage of the Bush tax cuts:
To make 10-year cost estimates look better, and to use a Senate rule making the measures easier to pass, those tax bills had sunset provisions…
Do I need to tell you that the “controversial parliamentary maneuver” the Democrats plan to use is the same “Senate rule making the measure easier to pass” to which Norris refers.
Now, I’m not alleging some grand conspiracy here, but these opposing glosses on the reconciliation process illustrate how well the Republicans have managed to frame this issue to a compliant press. There really is nothing controversial about reconciliation, and it is only a parliamentary maneuver in the very narrow sense that any gambit that utilizes a rule in order to get something done is a maneuver. Since when, moreover, is majority rule controversial?
The real “parliamentary maneuver” being employed in the health care debate is the filibuster, or the threat thereof, a maneuver meant to be used sparingly which is now being used by the Republicans to block nearly anything. The rarely used filibuster was, indeed, controversial when Republicans were in the majority and they decried the idea that any of their bills or nominations should be deprived of an up or down vote. Many Democrats, such as Ben Nelson, agreed with them back then, but they’ve now all changed their minds, including Nelson, and the press’s collective mind has now changed too.
It’s a topsy turvy world when the idea of majority rule is controversial, but no one bats an eye when a single senile Senator from Kentucky can hold up a vote, thereby depriving millions of people of extended unemployment benefits.
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