Health Care BS

The White House, congressional Democrats, and their media toad-eaters are still  pretending Obamacare can be passed via reconciliation, a.k.a. “the nuclear option”:

The White House called for a ’simple up-or-down’ vote on health care legislation Sunday … In voicing support for a simple majority vote, White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle signaled Obama’s intention to push the Democratic-crafted bill under Senate rules that would overcome GOP stalling tactics.

What the AP calls “GOP stalling tactics” is the filibuster, a Senatorial tradition ferociously defended by the Democrats and the “news” media before it became inconvenient.

And the only way to overcome a GOP filibuster is to use reconciliation. But, as Democrat Senator Kent Conrad pointed out yesterday, that once-obscure maneuver won’t work:

Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform … It won’t work because it was never designed for that kind of significant legislation.

Moreover, the use of this procedural gimmick involves a �pass and patch� process that requires House Dems to pass the Senate bill BEFORE reconciliation can be used to “patch� it.

And anti-abortion Democrat Bart Stupak has aleady pointed out that the House votes aren’t there for the Senate bill due to its many objectionable provisions.

Nonetheless, the bluff still has a lot of conservatives spooked. Saturday we witnessed a fit of handwringing from Andy McCarthy, and today Michelle Malkin writes the following:

They’re all in — and they’ve convinced themselves that you do not care about the process. They’ve learned nothing from the Tea Party protests, the town hall revolts, or the Massachusetts election. The White House/Democrat message: Screw you!

But it doesn’t matter what the message is. All that matters is the votes. And, regardless of how much bluster we get from the White House, congressional Dems and the media, they simply don’t have the votes.

UPDATE:

The ‘nuclear” theories are becoming more and more Byzantine every minute:

The veep presides over the Senate so the veep has the final say; even the Senate parliamentarian, the de facto authority on whether any given provision of the bill qualifies as “budgetary� or not, merely advises Biden on his final ruling.

As Paul Hsieh suggests below, that the White House is preparing a smaller version of Obamacare probably means they can’t make this work either.