While calling for more civility and bipartisanship, President Obama is bastardizing the legislative process in a strong armed attempt to ram through Obamacare despite the will of the American people. Before his televised health care summit with congressional Republicans next week, Mr. Obama will publish his own health care plan as a privileged budget reconciliation bill according to a senior congressional aide. (source)

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For those unfamiliar with reconciliation, the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 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. (The Democrats lost their 60 vote supermajority recently when the voters of Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown to replace the late Democrat Ted Kennedy in the US Senate. Stopping Obamacare was cited by voters as one of if not the main reasons for now-Senator Brown's victory.)

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 President 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 in his desperation for a political victory, no matter how hollow, President Obama is threatening to mis-use this budgetary process to overrule the American people and ram this huge, obscenely expensive and potentially deadly piece of unpopular legislation through even while claiming he is to listening to the voters and is willing to work with Republicans to develop true and reasonable reform.

His accomplices in the liberal media, specifically the New York Times claim Mr. Obama is attempting to "ease [an] impasse as [the] bipartisan meeting approaches" (source) but the reality is he is playing Chicago-style thug politics against not only Congressional Republicans but also against the people he has sworn to serve.

Responding to the possibility of Obamacare as a privileged budget reconciliation bill, Representative Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) said, “If the president is sincere about moving forward in a bipartisan fashion, he must take the reconciliation process - which will be used to jam through legislation that a majority of Americans do not want - off the table." (source)

What has become painfully obvious over the past year is that President Obama is not sincere. Not about bipartisan health care reform, not about bipartisanship in general and not about listening to the American people. This reconciliation maneuver is the latest proof that he, along with his congressional cronies, will continue pushing their unwanted and unaffordable far-left agenda unless and until they are stopped at the ballot box in November.