But for arguments sake, say you are a rules purist, as many Republicans now claim to be. Reconciliation is not a “trick” as Fox News is now calling it. It is a recognized Senate procedure: it is a “rule”, that has been used many many times, and mostly by Republicans.
Furthermore, when Republican’s have used it, they used as the initial means of passing a bill. They never “first” met the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, as this health care bill has. They went straight to reconciliation as option one. Now I have no argument with that approach. The Democrats should have done the same thing.
But they did not. The Democrats went the traditional way, and crafted a bill that met the 60 vote threshold. In all this “talk”, remember that we have a Senate Bill BECAUSE it met the 60 vote threshold. The process we are talking about NOW is not to pass a “new” health care bill via reconciliation (step one in the Republican model). It is to take the House bill, and the Senate bill, and reconcile the differences between the two. The Democrats used the “traditional” approach to passing a bill from step one, something the Republican’s did not do when they used reconciliation.
