Even as the world watched the United States Senate pass the reconciliation bill Chris Matthews said wouldn't and couldn't ever happen, Matthews is back to reassess his prediction. His startling conclusion: I was right and Grayson is still wrong!
The LA Times' James Rainey has the story:
Matthews told me that, smoldering YouTube clip notwithstanding, it was Grayson who got it wrong back in January. He said the congressman was obviously referring back then to the House passing a new piece of legislation, rather than signing on to the approved Senate health bill and then having differences reconciled.
"He denied the House had to pass the Senate bill and then have reconciliation," Matthews said at one point. "I never got an answer from him, all I got was a posture. He wasn't helping me explain it. He was just taking a position."
Kudos to Rainey for not buying it:
Let's just say that seems a tad, uh, ungenerous. Especially because the lawmaker had to make do mostly with sentence fragments, in the face of Matthews' unrelenting inquisition. When pressed by Matthews, though, Grayson did manage to suggest taking further action on a bill "already passed with 60 votes." That would seem to refer to the health reform passed by the U.S. Senate, not launching entirely new legislation.
Matthews further theorizes that Grayson wanted to use the reconciliation process as a backdoor to fulfill his goal of enacting the so-called "public option," giving Americans a government-run alternative to private health insurance. I'm not sure how the MSNBC star would know that, though, since the congressman never mentioned the public option. And his interviewer never asked about it.
Here's the bottom line: Matthews thinks he's right because in his mind that day, he was having a completely different conversation about reconciliation than Grayson was. And he was doing that because the conversation he wanted to have -- about how difficult reconciliation rules normally make it to establish policy in what's supposed to be a budget-related bill -- was one in which he could show off his general knowledge about what's widely regarded as an arcane and complex process.
Grayson, though, was talking about a specific, strategic and highly targeted use of the process. But more importantly, he was telling Matthews (or attempting to tell him, anyway) about actual plans the Democratic leadership had for using the process to help enact the biggest bill that Congress has passed in years, but Matthews wouldn't hear of it, because it interrupted his riff about what an experienced legislative hand he was.
Ordinarily, yes, it is said that you can't (or shouldn't) use the reconciliation process to establish policy -- that is, to authorize new programs, as opposed to working out financing for those that already exist. That's what lay at the heart of Matthews' challenge to Grayson to name a single program that had ever been established that way. (Matthews forgets about the COBRA health insurance extension program here, and the fact that COBRA stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. But it was the passage of COBRA that motivated the adoption of new and stricter rules against such provisions in reconciliation, so Matthews would doubtless insist he was still right.) But again, Matthews' challenge has little or nothing to do with what should have been the point of the interview -- that is, what are Democrats going to do about health insurance reform?
So I'm stuck having to restate my original objection here: Matthews was so wrapped up in the opportunity he'd created for himself to prove that he was a master of insiderism and Grayson a dirty netroots hippie that he purposely bypassed the giant scoop Grayson was handing him on a silver platter, and instead set to bashing his teeth in with a rhetorical baseball bat.
The rest of the exchange, of course, speaks for itself, especially in today's context, when the Senate has in fact passed the very reconciliation bill about which Matthews was speaking when he called it:
The secret route to the Indies that only you know about?
The very same reconciliation bill about which Matthews laughed out loud and said:
Wanna bet? Do you want to bet that they're gonna do this?
The very same reconciliation bill about which Matthews bellowed:
This is netroots talk! This is outsider talk, and you're an elected official and you know you can't do it. You're pandering to the netroots right now. I know what you're doing!
The very same reconciliation bill about which Matthews was screaming:
I know what I'm talking about! You ask anybody... you ask anybody in the Senate right now... Go call the Senate legislative counsel's office and ask them if you can do this. Go ask the parliamentarians if you can do this. You haven't bothered to do that.
Well, today they're doing it, Chris. And you're giving interviews to the press saying you were right when you said they couldn't?
I'm going to show this to you one more time, Chris. Rainey tells us:
Matthews told me that, smoldering YouTube clip notwithstanding, it was Grayson who got it wrong back in January. He said the congressman was obviously referring back then to the House passing a new piece of legislation, rather than signing on to the approved Senate health bill and then having differences reconciled.
"He denied the House had to pass the Senate bill and then have reconciliation," Matthews said at one point. "I never got an answer from him, all I got was a posture. He wasn't helping me explain it. He was just taking a position."
But look what you did to Grayson when the whole point of the plan actually came up:
MATTHEWS: OK, you ever call up a Democratic Senator and say why don't you do this by reconciliation?
GRAYSON: What makes you think they're not going to do it? What do you know that I don't know?
MATTHEWS: Because... they've refused to do it because they cannot get past the filibuster rule. The United States Senate is different than the House.
GRAYSON: I...
MATTHEWS: You're allowed to talk as long as you want in the Senate.
GRAYSON: Not with reconciliation.
MATTHEWS: Unless you get cloture.
GRAYSON: With reconciliation it's 51 votes, not 60 votes.
MATTHEWS: What do you mean, reconciliation? You can't create a program through reconciliation!
GRAYSON: You can create an amendment...
MATTHEWS: Nobody's ever done one!
GRAYSON: The bill's already passed with 60 votes, you...
MATTHEWS: Name a program that's...
GRAYSON: All you need to do is...
MATTHEWS: Congressman, just name me the program that's ever been created through reconciliation. Name one! One!
You set up the problem just fine, even though you were kind of a dick about it. But as soon as Grayson distinguishes the specifics of this situation from your general assertion about reconciliation by saying, "You can create an amendment..." you cut him off and go right back to screaming your most irrelevant talking point of the day, insisting that he name a program for you that had been created by reconciliation. A point which had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the strategy he was trying to describe to you, which turned out to be 100% on the money, and which everyone with eyes was able to watch happening live on national television today.
That's some nerve you've got to go to the papers and say you got that right. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, and frankly I believe you are, and that's why you're trying to cling to this idiotic notion that you were right about a question nobody was asking, even as Congressman Grayson was trying to get you to stop sputtering for long enough to recognize that news was trying to break on your show, if you would have shut up long enough to realize it and stop trying to stomp it to death.
FAIL.
Good day, sir.