Quote Of The Week

Look, it would be okay for reporters and pundits to be obsessed with what legislative method is employed to pass health care reform if they boned up on the issue. Alternatively, it would be okay for them not to understand it at all if they deemed it an irrelevant issue. (Which, in my opinion, it is.) But obsessed and ignorant makes for a bad combination.

-- Jonathan Chait at The New Republic.

Chait is referring to how reporters and pundits are buying into the GOP bullshittery that health care reform is going to be passed via reconciliation. As Kevin Drum explained:

[T]he Democratic plan is not to pass health care reform via reconciliation. It never has been. The plan is to pass it via regular order (i.e., have the House approve the bill already passed by the Senate) and then amend it with a few modest modifications that are passed via reconciliation and therefore can't be filibustered in the Senate.

Once again, you gotta hand it to the GOP. Republicans in the Senate are currently on pace to break their own filibuster record:

In the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, with Republicans in the minority, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the current session of Congress -- the 111th -- for all of 2009 and the first two months of 2010 the number already exceeds 40. The most the filibuster has been used when Democrats were in the minority was 58 times in the 106th Congress of 1999-2000.

That should be the big political story, yet the GOP somehow got reporters and pundits to run with a story that has no basis in reality.

I said it before and I'll say it again: Republicans have horrible ideas, but they have political maneuvering down to a fine art.