David makes a great point, and a great argument for using reconciliation for the health care bill. Technically, the Health care bill IS a tax and budgetary issue. The minority party has done NOTHING but prove their only mission is to stop the president’s agenda and not bother to make any real contributions.

“Freeze Federal Spending – but keep sending troops to Afghanistan. Oh, and keep building the military in general. But Healthcare? That’s just crazy socialist talk.”

Right.
What we really need to do, is continue to intervene in the affairs of other nations, to the point of war. After all, they *need* our idealogy. An ideology that apparently has extreme difficulty agreeing that the health and welfare of our own citizens in important enough to merit widely-available, affordable healthcare.

The reconciliation is only for budgetary and tax issues. It is designed so that a minority can not shut down the government indefinately. It is not for normal legislation.

I don’t mean to suggest that Democrats are any better when it comes to the deficit, although they have a better case for saying so based on the contrasting fiscal records of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The national debt belongs to both parties. But at least the Democrats don’t go on Fox News day after day proclaiming how fiscally conservative they are, and organize tea parties to rant about deficits, without ever putting forward any plan for reducing them. Nor do they pretend that they have no responsibility whatsoever for projected deficits, at least half of which can be traced directly to Republican policies, according to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.

It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt. Space prohibits listing all their names, but the final Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.

And — lets remember that the current proposals in the House and Senate to reform health insurance cost less than the Medicare Part D giveaway that was not paid for.