Senatorial Budget Reconciliation is not “simple majority rule,” Obama

National Review outdoes itself, again, with Myths about Reconciliation, using reconciliation to pass Obamacare would be inappropriate and unprecedented. Here’s why by Daniel Foster & Stephen Spruiell.

The truth is that every single piece of successful legislation to emerge from the Senate — via reconciliation or otherwise — has done so via a final, up-or-down vote with a 50-plus-one threshold. The debate about reconciliation is a debate about the path to that vote. It’s about whether the Senate is and ought to be something more than a slightly smaller, slightly crustier House of Representatives.

When Harry Reid took over the majority leadership of the Senate, he vowed that “as our founding fathers intended, the Senate will perform its role as the ‘cooling saucer’ where debate and amendments play a role in forging consensus and compromise.”

Would that he lived up to those words.