Truth comes out about reconciliation on Obama's news network

Lawrence O'Donnell went on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning and shone some much needed light on Obama's reconciliation strategy. The occasionally unhinged O'Donnell served as a Democratic Senate aide during the health care fight in 1994 and knows his way around legislative process. Newsbusters caught this moment of frank honesty.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Will Democrats get health care passed?

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: I'm going to say what I've said all along in my humble approach to this subject. I, having worked on this kind of legislation on the Senate floor, trying to get it passed, and in committee. I do not see how they can do this. Now, and part of that is because it's never been done before. And they have moved into a legislative territory that has never previously existed. The Republicans have not been very smart about trying to describe this. It's difficult to describe. But this is unprecedented, using reconciliation this way. Because what they've done, is that they've abandoned a bill in mid-conference. The Senate passed a bill, the House passed a bill. They were in mid-conference negotiating this bill, in conference, and they said it's going to be impossible for us to pass it now because of Scott Brown, so we're going to abandon conferencing this bill and move over to another legislative vehicle, called reconciliation. To handle something you've already been legislating another way, now, that's never occurred before.

SCARBOROUGH: That's never happened?

O'DONNELL: Never, never, never.

Reconciliation is indeed unprecedented in this way. As O'Donnell pointed out, never before has a Congress tried to insert the reconciliation process into a bill mid-conference. Most bills that go through reconciliation are designed with the procedure in mind. The last use of reconciliation on a health care initiative, for example, was COBRA -- the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. In contrast, Obama's Democrats designed ObamaCare as a standard bill, then suddenly decided to switch to reconciliation after Scott Brown's upset.

This might not sit well with O'Donnell's MSNBC colleagues like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Both have been perpetuating the lie, lifted from Obama's talking points, that Republicans have used reconciliation before and this is no different. Thanks to O'Donnell, the truth has been exposed on MSNBC.