The Post Partisan President

Pres. Barack Obama campaigned as the "post-partisan" presidential candidate. But he has been anything if not more polarizing as the nation's chief executive than even Pres. George W. Bush was.

The president has said, come hell or high water, he wants a vote on his healthcare deform bill by the end of March. The time for talking is over, says Mr. Obama. Everything that can be said about the bill has been said. Well, not exactly.

The president conveniently overlooks the fact that, unlike his healthcare bill, every piece of major social legislation, as well as most major budget bills in our lifetime enjoyed bipartisan support. The latest maneuver is to use the Senate's Budget Reconciliation process to pass the health bill with a bare minimum (51) votes limiting debate to 20 hours. This will eliminate the threat of a filibuster, which will take 60 votes to break.

Pres. Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid say that this has been done before. But they can't point to one piece of major social legislation  where the reconciliation process, appropriately nicknamed "the nuclear option," has been used to bypass the opposition party. Not one.
Take a look:

• Welfare Reform. Almost as polarizing in its day as healthcare is now. Republicans pioneered the concept; Democrats hated it. But in the end 78 senators voted yes. This included half of all Democrats--including current Vice President Joe Biden.
• State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP): Yes, S-CHIP was passed through the same budget reconciliation process that Democrats want to use to cram healthcare down the throats of the American public. Democrats use this example as a precedent for justifying sneaking the bill through the Senate on a simple majority vote. But they also fail to tell you that S-CHIP passed easily with 85 votes--overwhelmingly supported by Democrats and Republicans (43 of them) alike.
• The 2001 Bush Tax Cuts. Again, Democrats, to hide the truth as they often have done on this bill, point to the use of reconciliation in 2001 to pass what have come to be known as the Bush tax cuts. But they fail to mention that 12 Democrats joined Republicans to create the majority that passed the bill.
• The 1981 Reagan Budget. It is true that budget reconciliation process was used to pass Pres. Reagan's first budget. But, again, the Democrats hide the truth about reconciliation. The Reagan Budget passed the Senate overwhelmingly with 80 votes--many of them Democrats. Citing it as an example of how reconciliation can be used to get a controversial bill through the Senate is dishonest.  A four-fifths majority hardly qualifies as controversial.

The only situation that comes close to what we have now is Pres. Clinton's attempt to ram HillaryCare through the Congress is 1993. HillaryCare was as unpopular as ObamaCare is.

But Pres. Clinton had the good sense to back off after a discussion with liberal Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV). Sen. Byrd is the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and the foremost Senate parliamentarian. In 1993 he counseled Pres. Clinton that to use reconciliation to cram down an unpopular bill that had no bipartisan support would be an abuse of the reconciliation process.

Of course, it typical Democrat fashion, the former Ku Klux Klansman from West Virginia now says that reconciliation is OK. Like the white sheet escapades of the Exalted Cyclops from Appalachia himself,  it looks like reconciliation has been rehabilitated.

So to the list of middle-of-the-night votes, shady back room deals (the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, the Florida Flim-Flam), and fuzzy math you can add partisan misused of Senate rules to pass this stinker of a bill.

 Barack Obama is far from the post-partisan president. He will go down in history as the president that took bare knuckles partisanship to a new depth.

Just thought you might like to know.