Hugh Hewitt: Democrats will impose Obamacare no matter the cost

President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are embarked on a radical plan to fundamentally change American health care.

The operative term is "radical," and the media should use that term in order to accurately convey the nature not just of the scope of the changes being pushed, or of the level of Medicare cuts on which those changes are premised, but also to accurately describe the process by which the radical Democrats propose to impose their vision.

The plan is to push Obamacare through the House on the promise of a subsequent "fix" that will use an arcane Senate procedure known as "reconciliation" to modify the health care legislation in order to bypass the Senate's 60-vote requirement for substantive legislation.

No matter what rhetoric the Democrats employ, this is indeed a radical -- there's that word again -- maneuver, one that will demolish forever the Senate's long-standing tradition of requiring a supermajority to enact sweeping legislation that fundamentally alters an area of complex law. Reconciliation has indeed been used for tax rate changes, which go up and down, and on two occasions for very focused initiatives on welfare reform and continuance of health care coverage.

But reconciliation is a recent and rare exception to the rule of supermajority, and its use here will forever spell the end of the 60-vote requirement for major legislation. If the vast changes contemplated by Obamacare can be pushed through reconciliation, then there is no limiting principle for the future.

Expect both conservatives and liberals to insist that, if the process could be made to fit for Obamacare in 2010, then it surely must be able to accommodate any other fervently hoped for piece of legislation.

Thus in the space of 10 years the Senate Democrats will have re-engineered the supermajority tradition of the "Greatest Deliberative Body in the World" into one that is routinely applied to judicial nominees but waived for the most sweeping, most partisan legislative jam-downs.

With the exception of the bipartisan filibuster of President Johnson's ethically compromised pick of Abe Fortas as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1968, judicial filibusters were unheard of before 2003.

Though "blue slips" and "holds" did hobble many nominees in committee or on the floor, these procedures are distinct from the requirement of 60-plus votes to pass new laws. As rare as a judicial filibuster was in the last century, so, too, was the use of reconciliation to avoid the requirement of supermajority in law-making. Senate Democrats have trashed both traditions, and both were done in the service of ideology over basic traditions of governance.

Pelosi's tired talking point about "majority rule" asks the public to dismiss as irrelevant the jettisoning of a long-standing approach to governance that limited the speed with which Congress could act.

This has been a virtue of the American republic since "The Federalist Papers" defended the Constitution's original design as one intended to keep factions from moving too quickly to dominate politics for short times of abrupt change.

We are not a majority rule system, and never have been. Government's ability to move quickly was cabined from the start and for the very good reason that sudden swings in law are not often to the advantage of freedom.

If Obamacare does indeed make it into law, the damage it will do to health care will be immense. But just as great a cost will be the injury done to the Senate and to the measured approach to legislation that has marked America as a deliberate and deliberating republic.