There's a lot of buzz now about pushing a Health Care Reform strategy that commences with the House passing the Senate HCR Bill as is, followed by another bill to improve and strengthen it crafted to pass the Senate via the reconciliation process. That makes a lot of sense. In fact it has always made a lot of sense to break HCR into two component pieces of legislation; one for reforms that reconciliation can't address but that could pass the Senate with the 60 votes needed for cloture, one passed by the reconciliation route with reforms that qualify for that path that can only muster a simple majority in the Senate for passage.

Because it makes so much sense and always has, it virtually begs the question, why is this only being seriously considered now? Why, had Coakley won in Massachusetts and Democrats thus retained their 60 member caucus in the Senate, were House negotiators about to be forced to accept a final piece of legislation that was 90 parts Senate version, and only 10 parts House?

It's not a moot question, because once again the House is being pressured, this time to word for word accept the version of HCR legislation that has already passed the Senate. Now the House is being told, "Don't worry we can cure what ails it through reconciliation", which is eerily akin to what liberals were told when the Senate version first cleared the Senate; "Don't worry, we can make it much better in the Conference committee" before those hopes were quashed by Conservadems in the Senate digging in their heels.

Talk about "the Reconciliation Sidecar strategy" has mostly been vague, with the content of that sidecar ill defined. except to say that it could be used to restore the agreements that were hammered out in negotiations between the House in Senate only to be thrown into chaos by the Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election. I keep waiting for Democratic leaders to assert what for liberals is obvious; the silver lining in that wake up call from Massachusetts is our chance now to go back and get it right, to restore at least the Public Option and Medicare buy in that Joe Lieberman's "objections" forced Democrats to drop from the final compromise Senate version before it's final stripped down passage. Unless I've missed something none of them have said it, neither on nor off the record.

What I've heard instead is various pundits, some of them bloggers and others in the mainstream media, saying Democrats can pass the Senate bill now and improve it later, with a possible Public Option dangled out there as a carrot for getting on board with that strategy.

The reason, the one and only reason, why Democrats justified abandoning a Public Option in the first place was that unobtainable 60 vote threshold for it in the Senate, which becomes a null and void concern once the number of votes needed for passage in the Senate drops to 50 plus Biden by using reconciliation. So why don't we hear Democrats pushing "Senate Bill plus Sidecar" outright saying "Of course we'll minimally restore the Senate compromise that a working group of liberals and moderates worked out with Harry Reid before Joe Lieberman double crossed us"?

My growing unease is that we may be caught in a perennial spiral of managed lowered expectations. Now instead of having hope for at least winning a compromise on the compromised compromise of a Public Option as part of final health care reform, some seem to be asking us to hope, after the Senate bill is accepted exactly as is, that later efforts pursued through reconciliation will fix its most glaring deficiencies by restoring the deal we were about to get before Coakley lost. That's the deal that Liberals were told to hold our noises and support because nothing any longer could be done to improve upon it. That was back in the days when our Democratic leadership was firmly rejecting reconciliation as an option. Sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same. I hope that isn't true now about health care reform.

A push for a reconciliation sidecar later, without a firm pledge that a real public option will be part of that, in order to win passage of the current HCR Senate bill as currently worded now, would tell me pretty much all that I need to know about today's Democratic Party.