Senators are doing the right thing by pushing an $8 billion addition to fund several more months of COBRA subsidies for workers laid off after June 1. We wonder, then, why House Dems, who say they care deeply about health care, didn’t sign on.

While not passing a COBRA extension, Congress did manage to vote for an incredibly expensive second engine for the F-35, which the military says it doesn’t need and really doesn’t want. We are literally wasting billions on hardware the military is asking Congress to cut while causing economically besieged Americans to lose their insurance.

Today, during his remarks on the way forward for health care reform, President Obama indirectly but strongly called for using reconciliation. From his speech: Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote [...]

Talk about bad timing. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin launched a campaign today to end the filibuster and restore the ability for a simple majority of senators to pass legislation. His efforts include an email to supporters directing them to sign a petition at fedupwiththefilibuster.com to stop the abuse of rules that prevent majority rule. [...]

There is a great new article from NPR showing that there is nothing new or extraordinary about using reconciliation to pass health care reform. Reconciliation is a normal, perfectly usable tool to pass health care reform. It has been used repeatedly by both parties. Of course, this is the same message FDL has been repeating [...]