Calling Dr. Strangelove...Calling Dr. Strangelove!

Ever since the movie, "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", Dr. Strangelove has been synonymous with condoning the doomsday option of initiating an all-out nuclear war.

It now appears that Dr. Strangelove might be advising the Democrats on passing health care reform legislation without a single Republican vote or without a Filibuster. The "Strangelove" solution is to go nuclear by using a parliamentary procedure that is called Reconciliation (Click to See Wikipedia Definition). Often, Reconciliation is referred to as the "nuclear option" because it literally "blows up" the normal Congressional procedures and allows the passage of a law without any input from the minority party.

In effect, the use of Reconciliation in this case would allow the passage of this country's largest and most far-reaching legislation, ever, to go through Congress and be approved with a simple 51% Democratic majority. In doing so, it would completely ignore the increasing public dissent against any nationalized health care system that includes the public option. It could be done without any input from the Republicans.

In the past, Reconciliation has only been used to get stalled budgets through Congress so that the government didn't come to a complete and grinding halt. Now, the Democrats want to use it to ram through a piece of legislation that is totally ideologically-based and without any input from the opposition party. Is this the post-partisan government that Obama claimed he would create if he got into office?

I think the nuclear option will change the face of our legislative procedure forever because, once played, it will no longer be feared to be used again. The precedent-barrier will have been broken. The threat of future Presidential vetoes could be totally thrown out the window and the filibuster as a parliamentary tool would be dead.

I think the Democrats are playing with fire on this. The use of Reconciliation could result in their own demise through voter backlash. But, the problem with "this" Democratic Congress is that they are being driven by an extreme left ideology that is totally blind to being a true representative government; and, I don't think they care if they actually win or lose the next election. Obama, himself, has said as much as evidenced by this video:



All along, I believe that the entire thrust of this current government is to create a "no going back" change in America. The massive debt, Cap and Trade, and this Health Care Reform make no sense otherwise. Just maybe the true "nuclear option" is in all the legislation we are seeing from Obama and the Democrats of Congress. An "option" which is really intended to destroy America as a capitalist society and rebuild it as a socialist state. This could be the very "doomsday" scenario that Dr. Strangelove is "now" envisioning for America!