Conservative Dems oppose reconciliation but deal still possible on health-care reform

By Michael J.W. Stickings

TPM: "Lincoln, Bayh Won't Support Passing Health Care Fixes Via Reconciliation."

Screw 'em.

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Okay, okay... fine. Let's expand on that.

The point is, the Democrats don't need Lincoln and Bayh (or Nelson). The Senate has already passed reform legislation and the House, which previously passed its own, more robust version, could pass the Senate bill as is, and then the Democrats could use the reconciliation process to pass additional reform elements.

Ezra Klein:

The virtue of running the compromise through reconciliation is that you can lose a couple of conservative Democrats. In theory, this could be a good thing: 51 senators could enact a better bill than 60 senators. The most unpopular compromises -- namely, Nelson's Medicaid deal -- came in the effort to round up those final votes. The bill's most popular policies -- like the public option and the Medicare buy-in -- were eliminated to placate conservative Democrats.

But will the Democrats rise to the challenge?

[I]nstead of seeing this as an opportunity to scrub the bill of some of its more noxious concessions and restore some of the legislation's more popular elements, Democrats seem terrified by the prospect of, as some Hill aides have said to me, "cutting another deal." When you've defined "deals" so broadly as to include votes on legislation and then taken such deals off the table, however, you've also taken legislating off the table.

You know, even if Democrats had 90 of 100 senators and a supper-massive majority in the House, they'd still find a way to defeat themselves.

As Steve Benen keeps saying: "Pass. The. Damn. Bill."

For fuck's sake.