Reply #30: Amazing that no one in this thread has mentioned the budget reconciliation process. [View All]

All this talk about filibusters during a Congressional session when Democrats held both houses and therefore could use the budget reconciliation process for anything they wanted as long as they met its rules. And yet they used it only for a corporatist health insurance reform plus a minor reform of education finance.

Democratic politicians have apparently succeeded at their disinformation campaign to convince their supposed constituents (voters) that there was nothing they could do. Apparently while in the backrooms assuring their real constituents (corporations) that they were following the marching orders.

There *was* something they could have done. Much of what we would want them to do could have been done through budget reconciliation. Most of what couldn't be done through reconciliation could have been done by Presidential order (like bringing the troops home and not starting any new wars, not creating new secret prisons, not going further than Bush in some areas of secrecy and violation of our Constitutional rights, and on it goes).