Letter to the Editor

Healthcare bill belongs in the trash

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

To the Editor:

This spring the U.S. House and Senate passed a health care bill into law by using the process known as reconciliation.

Using this process as a crutch, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate passed a bill that amounts to one-sixth of the total U.S. economy with no Republication votes and just 51 Democratic senators, not the three-fifths majority that is generally needed to pass a bill into law. President Obama eagerly signed it although most of the polls showed that a majority of Americans were against it.

As I understand it, this reconciliation process was passed into law in 1974 and first used in 1980. It was used as a means at the end of a fiscal year to enact legislation to fine tune revenue and spending levels through legislation that could not be filibustered in the Senate. In simple terms, to keep the government from shutting down without having passed a budget.

This process has been used several times by both Democrats and Republicans, and in my humble opinion this reconciliation law should be voted out and thrown in the trashcan where it belongs, along with the new healthcare law.

I hope that many Americans will agree with me and utilize the one means we have to bring about common sense change -- it's called the voting booth.

I believe that one American in particular might agree with my view of the reconciliation law and what is happening now in the United States Congress.

He wrote in a letter to William Johnson in 1823: "On every questions of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

This letter was signed by Thomas Jefferson.

W.T. Watson

Cloverdale