David Waldman:

Former Senate parliamentarian Robert Dove [. . .] says [. . .] "I've never seen a two-bill strategy" where reconciliation is used to fix another piece of legislation, he says. "It's permissible, I've just never seen it."

[. . .] The letter of the Budget Act says yes. I say yes. Now it looks like Dove says yes, too.

Republican Senator Judd Gregg adds another reason why the reconciliation fix must be passed concurrently with the House passage of the Senate Stand Alone health bill. Here is a new GOP talking point, one that actually has merit:

The White House may renege on passing fixes to the Senate's healthcare bill once the House has passed it, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) claimed Thursday. [. . .] "They're using reconciliation to pass the great big bill," Gregg said during an appearance on CNBC. "Once they pass the great big bill, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House didn't care if reconciliation passed. I mean, why would they?" [. . .] "In my opinion, reconciliation is an exercise for buying votes, which, once they have the votes they really don't need it," he said.

(Emphasis supplied.)I would not trust the Senate Dems on ANYTHING. If I were the House, I would insist on simultaneous passage.

Speaking for me only

The National Enquirer is reporting a federal grand jury in North Carolina investigating payments by John Edwards' presidential campaign's to Rielle Hunter, is about to be indicted -- "imminently."

The Enquirer got lucky and was right about Edwards' affair. Are they pushing their luck?

It seems the grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina does frequently meet on Thursdays. (Grand juries sit for 12 to 18 months. In lesser populated districts, they meet a few days a month.)

Does the Enquirer merely have a scoop that the grand jury is concluding the investigation, and realizing it has a 50% chance of being right, jumping the gun and choosing the option that would boost their traffic? Or, is there a leak from John Edwards' camp? [More....]

This bit from a TNR puff piece on 'poor Rahmbo' made me laugh:

As Obama closed in on the presidency, he and his top aides turned to Obamaland’s unofficial head-knocker for the role of chief of staff. [. . .] Emanuel not only had the right sensibility. His loyalty and Washington know-how were beyond question. [. . .]

(Emphasis supplied.) Heh. Indeed, Rahmbo's loyalties are unquestionable -- they are to burnishing Rahmbo's image and power. That is precisely why he should never have been picked to be White House Chief of Staff. A WH Chief of Staff should have no personal agenda -- his agenda must be the President's. To be honest, I do not blame Rahmbo for this blunder. He is who he is and makes no secret of it. This is President Obama's mistake.

Speaking for me only

This dkos diary quotes Ezra Klein saying:

At the end of the day, it is up to Congressional Democrats to pass this [health] legislation and when they don't, it's on them. And I do think that there's an element of political dodge when what they say is, "Well the White House didn't lead sufficiently." We don't have a system built for us only to be able to solve problems when the White House is strategically perfect. Our presidents are going to fail us and our Legislature is going to have to do its job.

(Emphasis supplied.) The President laid out a health proposal, further refined by the addition of some GOP proposals and today the White House will lay out the legislative roadmap it wants for the health proposals (what happened to the separation of powers/impotent President argument the Village Dems used to trot out?) Whatever happens(passing the Senate bill or not passing the bill) is, as it always was, on all of them -- the Democratic President and the Democratic Congress. Is passing the Senate Stand Alone health bill with "assurances" of a reconciliation fix the smart and right thing for the House to do? I doubt it, but if the House does this, I want no whining about how the Senate "promised" anything and then failed to deliver. That is what you should expect from the Senate. That is what they always do. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 290 times, shame on me.

Speaking for me only

If and when the House votes for the Stand Alone Senate bill, and as what seems at least a strong possibility, the Senate reneges on a reconciliation bill, House Dems will have to explain why they voted for:

(a) The Cornhusker Kickback;

(b)the Louisiana Purchase: and

(c) the excise tax.

They'll get to explain to their progressive base how they got the public option, Medicare buy-in, better affordability credits, um, how they got . . . nothing. Good luck with that in November House Dems.

Speaking for me only

Q-Poll:

Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter leads Democratic primary challenger, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak 53 - 29 percent and has pushed ahead of Republican Pat Toomey 49 - 42 percent in a general election matchup, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today, up from a 44 - 44 percent tie December 18. In a battle of the unknowns, Toomey leads Sestak 39 - 36 percent with 24 percent undecided.

Rep. Joe Sestak has done both progressives and the Democratic Party a great favor - he has pushed Senator Specter to take progressive positions that have helped him politically.

Speaking for me only

One reason to have an up or down vote on the public option is to clear the brush of people like Tom Harkin. Jon Walker reports:

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) spent most of the year claiming he was a champion of the public option. Now that there is a possibility of getting a public option with a simple majority using reconciliation, Harkin has made clear that he will actively work to kill the public option, while tying himself in incoherent, illogical knots trying to justify his actions–while still trying to claim he supports the public option.

As Walker demonstrates, a vote for a public option amendment will not threaten anything. Harkin shows yet again again that he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer AND has trouble with the truth. At least for me, that is my realistic goal for up or down vote on the public option --smoke out the fakers, like Tom Harkin.

Speaking for me only

Greg Sargent reports that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) says that is a possibility:

Conrad said that under Congressional rules, for a reconciliation fix to be “scored,” it’s not necessary that it become law, but it is necessary for it to have passed both houses of Congress before getting fixed. “For the scoring to change it has to have passed Congress, and that means both houses,” he said. “The only thing that works here is the House has to pass the Senate bill,” Conrad continued. “Then the House can initiate a reconciliation measure that would deal with a limited number of issues that score for budget purposes.” After that, the Senate would pass the same reconciliation fix, Conrad explained, because even on the fix itself the House must go first because the lower chamber must initiate “revenue bills.”

(Emphasis suppied.) Conrad is full of crap imo. He says "reconciliation rules" dictate this. He cites no provision of the rules for this nonsense. And indeed, it is not in the rules. David Waldman explains:

What will Sully and Charles Murray say about this?

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Heh. For serious critique of the study see PZ Meyers.

Speaking for me only

The new Village Dem offensive (to be clear I am fine with it) is to portray the use of reconciliation as incidental to the passage of the whole of the health bills. The argument goes the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes and the House passed a bill so ironing out the differences through reconciliation is normal. Indeed, it is precisely what reconciliation was designed for. See Henry Aaron's tip of the spear article (PDF). Aaron wrote:

The idea of using reconciliation has raised concern among some supporters of health care reform. They fear that reform opponents would consider the use of reconciliation high-handed. But in fact Congress created reconciliation procedures to deal with precisely this sort of situation — its failure to implement provisions of the previous budget resolution. The 2009 budget resolution instructed both houses of Congress to enact health care reform. The House and the Senate have passed similar but not identical bills. Since both houses have acted but some work remains to be done to align the two bills, using reconciliation to implement the instructions in the budget resolution follows established congressional procedure.

This is more than a bit disingenuous. Conference reports are the usual way House and Senate bills are "reconciled," not companion reconciliation bills. After all, before Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, there was not going to be a reconciliation bill. More . . .

NY Governor David Paterson has announced he won't run for re-election. It was only a week ago he announced his re-election campaign.

“There are times in politics when you have to know not to strive for service, but to step back, and that moment has come for me,” Mr. Paterson told a room full of reporters in an afternoon press conference. In the most dramatic moment, the governor raised his right hand and offered what he called a “personal oath,”

...“I have never abused my office, not now, not ever,” said Mr. Paterson, his wife, Michelle Paige Paterson, by his side.

There are calls for him to resign now, which mostly seem to be a result of his alleged intervention in a staffer's domestic violence case: [More...]