In an op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal, would-be Health & Human Services Secretary (and tax cheat) Tom Dashle dragged out a recently deceased Kennedy, a little boy with cancer and a host of scare tactics in an effort to push for the passage of health care reform legislation. But even he knows he's selling something the American people don't want to buy. That's why he brought up the prospect of reconciliation - a nice sounding word that in this context means ramming hugely unpopular change down the throats of the American people.

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For those unfamiliar with the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, it created a legislative process of the United States Senate intended to allow a contentious budget bill to be considered without being subject to filibuster and named it reconciliation. Basically it allows the majority party to prevent the minority party's filibuster and pass legislation without having the otherwise required super majority of 60 senators. (Senator Edward Kennedy's recent death has reduced the Democrats' current majority to 59 pending a special election in January to fill Kennedy's vacant seat.)

The reconciliation process has been employed by both parties (in 1993 to enact President Bill Clinton's 1993 budget and in 2001, 2003 and 2005 to pass George W. Bush's tax cuts) but it has never been used for non-budgetary legislation. When President Clinton wanted to use reconciliation to pass his own health care plan, Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) insisted that the health care plan was out of bounds for a process that is theoretically about budgets.

But at a town hall meeting late last month Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico), one of the senators in a bipartisan group working on a health care reform bill, said of reconciliation, "It is a very difficult option to get implemented, but clearly I would support that if that's the only way to enact a measure." (source) You have to wonder how much bipartisanship is driving a man who would clearly support reconciliation.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of this issue is that Democrats are not considering reconciliation to pass a budget thereby avoiding a government shutdown or to enact widely popular tax cuts. No, they're considering it to ram through a health care reform bill that, according to a new Gallup Poll, only 37 percent of Americans want passed. (source)

Senator Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) correctly called such a plan "bastardization of the legislative process." (source) I couldn't agree more. But when asked if President Obama would support reconciliation with regard to getting health care reform legislation passed, White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod said, "At the end of the day this is not just a matter of process. It’s a matter of progress. And it’s enormously important that we get something done - and we’ll get it done, and we’ll do what the situation requires.” (source)

He might as well have added "No matter what the American people want."