Harry Reid last Friday:
In another surprising step forward for the public option, Senator Harry Reid’s office says that if a final decision is made to pass health reform via reconciliation, the Majority Leader would support holding a reconciliation vote on the public option.
Harry Reid on Tuesday:
“They should stop crying about reconciliation as if it’s never been done before,” Reid said.
Following Senate Democrats’ weekly luncheon, Reid said “nothing is off the table” but that “realistically, they should stop crying about this. It’s been done 21 times before.”
“The question is: Is reconciliation the only way we can do health-care reform?” he said.
Harry Reid today:
“Lamar, you’re entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. … No one has talked about reconciliation, but that’s what you folks have talked about ever since that came out, as if it’s something that has never been done before,” Reid said.
(Emphasis mine.)
What’s particularly choice about this is how Reid accuses Lamar Alexander of lying.
(Via the Corner.)
UPDATE: On Tuesday Harry Reid also tried to make the case that Republicans have used reconciliation “more than anyone else.” That’s true, in the sense that there are two parties and Republicans have used it more than Democrats. Of course, that’s because Republicans have controlled the Senate more years since reconciliation was invented (by Democrats) than the Democrats have. If you work out the number of uses per year in power, you get 0.5 for the Democrats and 0.7 for the Republicans, so there’s hardly any difference.
But that’s all beside the point. Every time reconciliation has been used before (there’s a list here), it was for the budget. That’s the purpose it was designed for. Now the Democrats want to abuse the process to rework the nation’s health care system. Under Senate rules, that’s not even allowed, but it remains to be seen whether the Senate parliamentarian will stand up to the pressure to allow it.
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