Scott Spiegel

Ever since Democrats suffered historic, butt-spanking losses in the 2010 midterms, they’ve been whimpering for “bipartisanship,” “cooperation,” “compromise,” “togetherness,” “shared responsibility,” and “national unity.”

President Obama has been coaxing House and Senate Republicans to work together with Democrats to get things done.

Recently New York Senator Charles Schumer, one of the most viciously partisan individuals on the planet (you might say he’s full of “vitriol”), suggested it might be melodious for Democrats and Republicans to sit mingled among one another at Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address, rather than hunkering down battalion-style on opposite sides of the room.

Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn was the first to stupidly take the bait, followed by dozens of other Congressmen including Charles Grassley, Pat Toomey, Mark Kirk, Olympia Snowe, and—surprise!—John McCain.

Obama, it should be remembered, campaigned for president on the promise that he would usher in a “new era of bipartisanship.”

If the Democratic 111^th Congress took Obama up on his idea, they had a funny way of showing it.

When they weren’t shutting Republicans out of committee meetings to write the 2009 stimulus bill and health care reform act, they were failing to post bills online with enough time to allow Republicans to read them and offer input.

Democrats rammed health care through inappropriately using budget reconciliation, because they couldn’t keep their 60-vote coalition after Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown.

The health care bill was so partisan and calculated to exclude a single strand of GOP DNA that not one Republican voted for it—not because Republicans were stubborn, but because the bill was so egregious that even 34 House Democrats voted against it.  As Governor Haley Barbour noted, the only thing bipartisan about ObamaCare was opposition to it.

Despite the misconception that the GOP covered their ears during the health care reform debate and refused to offer suggestions, House Republicans introduced dozens of their own bills during 2009.  These acts proposed innovative free-market improvements such as allowing sale of health insurance across state lines; expanding tax deductions, vouchers, and health savings accounts for routine care, prescriptions, and long-term care; and enacting medical malpractice tort reform.

None of the Republicans’ bills left the referral stage.  None of the GOP’s suggestions was included in any of the Democratic versions of the bill.

For that divisive, impenetrable firewall between Democrats and Republicans, you can thank then-House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her sterling “bipartisanship.”

Ditto for the cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House in 2009 but stalled in the Senate, and not for Democrats’ lack of trying.  (Coincidentally, the partisan energy bill squeaked by in the House with the same vote as ObamaCare, 219-212.)

The bill, cosponsored by über-leftists Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, was so odious and economy-wrecking that 44 House Democrats voted against it.

(Hey—maybe the 111^th Congress was bipartisan, only not in a way that anybody predicted!)

Now that cap-and-trade has died in the Senate, Obama is scheming to have Lisa Jackson and other far-left appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency implement an emissions-limiting plan over the objections of most Americans.

To be clear, I don’t favor bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship.  I wouldn’t have expected Democrats to capitulate to Republicans on everything when they had a majority in both chambers just to be nice.  (I would have expected them to capitulate on everything because they were wrong.)

There are significant philosophical differences between the two major parties.  One party is based on mob rule and is incongruent with the foundational nature of our country, which is not a democracy.  The other party is based on individual rights, rule of law, an inviolate Constitution, and representative government and is congruent with the foundational nature of our country, which is a representative, constitutional republic.

In his speech last night, Obama declared, “[W]e are still bound together as one people… we share common hopes.”  No we don’t, Mr. President.  Liberals hope for the government to take over every aspect of our lives, and conservatives hope to be left alone to figure it all out for themselves.

While conservatives try desperately to cut spending in Washington, Obama’s speech was dominated by pledges to blow trillions more we don’t have on green research and jobs, college degrees for everybody, and high-speed rail and Internet.

Conservatives want to protect us militarily against our enemies, whereas Obama’s speech covered everything under the sun until it meandered into the realm of foreign policy, and even then mostly bragged about the end of the Iraq War, troops returning from Afghanistan in July, and the useless Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

So I favor any action, symbolic or otherwise, that clarifies and amplifies the philosophical, partisan differences between the parties, including maintaining the traditional seating arrangement of one party on each side of the aisle.

Republicans should never fall into the bipartisanship trap Democrats set.

Democrats’ idea of bipartisanship is asking Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman what they think, then doing what Harry Reid wants.

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In anticipation of the humiliating defeat of their socialized medicine scheme, Democrats are feverishly working to get their legislation passed by cheating.

Their plan, known as “budget reconciliation,” works as follows: (1) have Senate committees expand Medicaid, cut Medicare, force individuals to buy and businesses to offer insurance, give subsidies to low-income people and tax credits to small businesses, levy new taxes, and do everything else Democrats wanted to do in their health care bill but knew would never pass; (2) lump it all into a bill; and (3) pass it with 50 votes and no filibuster.

The bill would also contain language to support enactment of a health care overhaul, but because provisions unrelated to the budget cannot legally be included, the Senate parliamentarian will likely strike these from the bill.  According to the New York Times, which favors the reconciliation swindle, it is unclear whether two key elements will be allowed in the bill: the requirement that insurance companies accept all candidates and charge the same regardless of condition, and the creation of a government health insurance exchange.

The Times eggs Democrats on to declare that these two provisions, while irrelevant to the budget, “are so intertwined with other reforms that they are [necessary] for other provisions that do affect spending or revenues.”

If that ruse doesn’t work, the Times notes, then the process could “leave the reform package riddled with holes—perhaps providing subsidies to buy insurance on exchanges that do not exist, for example.”  In this eventuality, Democrats would pass a second bill, subject to filibuster, that fills in gaps where budget-irrelevant provisions were removed.

Ignore for the moment the fact that Democrats’ chess-playing skills obviously aren’t very good: to wit, why would Republican senators support a bill to prop up the reconciliation bill, if the two bills in combination would lead to an outcome they opposed in the first place?

Ignore, too, the stipulation that the reconciliation bill may not legally cause deficits to increase, which a health care overhaul clearly would do.

There’s just the inconvenient detail that reconciliation was never designed to be used for anything remotely like what Democrats propose to use it for.

According to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Rules, the purpose of budget reconciliation is to “fine tune revenue and spending levels.”  Admittedly, in the Obama era, adding a trillion-dollar program here or there could be characterized as “fine tuning,” but I don’t think this is what the creators of reconciliation had in mind.

Democrats have offered the following compelling argument for using reconciliation to socialize health care: Republicans have used reconciliation!

Yes, Republicans have used reconciliation—for things it was supposed to be used for, such as adjusting tax rates and decreasing entitlement spending.  Claiming that reconciliation can be used for health care because Republicans have used it is like claiming that pesos can be used at Taco Bell because Mexicans have used them.

Even the New York Times admits, “The approach is risky.  Reconciliation bills are primarily intended to deal with budget items that affect the deficit, not with substantive legislation like health care reform.”  Note the sneaky, dishonest addition of “primarily.”

As Judd Gregg explained to Norah O’Donnell, who insisted Gregg was a hypocrite because he had favored reconciliation in the past, “Reconciliation is meant to adjust already existing programs.  You adjust tax rates, or you adjust already existing programs at the margin.  What’s being proposed here is, ab initio, a brand-new, major initiative which is the total rewrite of the health care system of the United States.”

President Clinton floated the idea of using reconciliation to pass health care legislation in 1993, but Senator Robert Byrd reminded him that reconciliation was meant to be used to square away budgets, not turn us into Canada.  In 2003, Congressional Republican leaders considered, then rejected, using reconciliation to pass their prescription benefits program.

In 2005, Senate Republicans introduced a provision allowing drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an attempt that failed when the provision was removed during reconciliation.  Whether this attempt was appropriate or not, it should be pretty clear that if we’re not allowed to use reconciliation to drill in a barren wilderness that makes up less than 0.5% of Alaska in the middle of an energy crisis and a war in Iraq, then it’s not appropriate to use budget reconciliation to take over 17% of the economy.

There’s a reason budget reconciliation was introduced as a separate parliamentary process: it was to be used to make adjustments to existing programs, not introduce massive new ones.  The total amount of debate time allowed for reconciliation is only 20 hours—about twice as long as Congress had to read the 1,600-page stimulus bill before voting, but still not very long.

By the way, I don’t fault Obama for threatening to violate the spirit of bipartisanship with the reconciliation maneuver, inasmuch as (1) I don’t favor Republicans in charge having to compromise when Democrats propose screwy ideas and (2) in order to put a halt to bipartisanship, Obama would have had to actually start practicing it first.  But it’s ironic that Congressional Democrats believe they are putting aside their longstanding, magnanimous display of bipartisanship by resorting to sleazy use of a tactic called “reconciliation.”