How And When? Health Care Reform Crawls Through Congress

If Republicans can use a Senate rule - cloture/filibuster - to stop a revised bill coming back to the Senate from the House, what's wrong with the Dems using a Senate rule - reconciliation - to fix the Senate bill rather than have a revised Senate bill come back to the Senate? Other than things like impeachment and amending the Constitution, the Constitution has nothing in it requiring 60 votes for passing legislation. All of these are creations of the Senate that can be changed by the Senate.

Here's the deal. The GOP is willing to use it's 41 votes - which represent about 37% of Americans - to prevent that passage of a bill supported by 59 votes, representing about 63% of the country. (Yeah, I know that a majority/plurality of Americans oppose the bill but you don't alway base your votes on public opinion polls, especially on big, controversial bills like civil rights or healthcare reform. You do what you think is right and hope that the voters agree with you once the law is put into action. If they don't agree with you, they can vote you out and the other party can change what you did once they regain power.) To get around this, the Dems are going to use reconciliation to fix the bill with a simple majority, which is the only thing the Constitution requires. Remember, the Dems aren't proposing putting the entire bill through reconciliation nor are they talking about adding in a public option (which can be passed through reconciliation). They're just trying to fix some of the problems with the Senate bill, some of which - eg, the Cornhusker Compromise - are things that nobody likes, regardless of party.

And sorry but I don't recall any Dems are anybody on the left raising a stink about Bush pushing legislation through reconciliation. There were complaints about the legislation itself - eg, the tax cuts - but not the process by which it was passed. Those things Bush passed through reconciliation got the necessary 51 (or more) votes. That's good enough for me even if I didn't like what passed. This 60 vote threshold is getting ridiculous. I can see it being necessary re: judicial appointments where somebody is being put onto the bench, basically, for life. But for just plain old legislation that can be changed later on? It's getting out of hand.