The Nuclear Option?

As Obama’s poll numbers continue to fall and bad news keep’s piling upon bad news, the administration has turned to desperation tactics and paranoia.  Talk has even begun about Obama being a one-termer, a consequence Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs says he’s comfortable with so long as he gets his agenda through.  Of course, the catch here is that Obama’s agenda is so unpopular with a majority of Americans that if he does implement it he’s guaranteed to be a one-termer.  If he doesn’t get it through, Obama’s presidency will be fatally damaged and he’ll wind up a caretaker president for whatever time he has left in the office.  It seems he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

So, with even his base in revolt, perhaps Obama and the Dems are ready to roll the dice and go it alone.  Beware the man with nothing to lose.  When the article first came out in the New York Times saying the go-it-alone strategy was being contemplated, most of us immediately saw it as a desperation tactic attempting to get the Republicans to play ball.  But Byron York’s column over at the Washington Examiner site is a troubling must-read.  Until I read it this morning go-it-alone seemed like a non-starter.  Passing radical, unpopular health care reform over the objections of a majority of Americans and without bipartisan support would be a Democratic death-wish.  Obama would be a guaranteed one-termer and the Democratic party would get slaughtered in the mid-term elections.  Even a party as dense as the Democrats wouldn’t risk it.   

York’s column, however, raises some points that might make go-it-alone seem attractive to the Democrats and Obama.  The so-called ‘reconciliation’ process in the Senate in which the Republicans could poke holes in the legislation, particularly the most egregious sections, might leave a bill in place that doesn’t seem so offensive to Americans.  It might also, through the long, drawn out process of debating each section, eventually paint the Republicans as obstructionists.  Most importantly for the left though, as York points out, it would put the infrastructure in place, one which could be filled in over time.  While massive, radical health care reform would not be the consequence of the initial legislation, it almost certainly would be in time, as it would expand naturally like any government program.  With the administration and the left-wingers who run Congress caught between a rock and a hard place, the so-called ‘nuclear option’, as York points out, may be their way out:

Veterans of the Senate tend to flinch from the sort of all-out warfare reconciliation could bring. But the fact is, reconciliation might in the end be the Democrats' best option. And it might work. Democrats wouldn't get everything they wanted, but they could create the structure for future growth. Later on, they'll add the plumbing. And the wiring. And maybe a chandelier.

Read the whole thing.