Reconciliation will pass the senate with a super-majority of 60.9 to 63%--Here’s how.

Here is an interesting analysis from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Republicans say that reconciliation should not be used to pass health reform since it is too important to be passed by a simple majority. They say such legislation should require a super majority of 60 or more. Well, that’s exactly what will happen if the senate Democrats use reconciliation as a means to reconcile the senate and house bills. The CEPR took a look at the makeup of the Senate assuming that each senator represents one half of his/her state’s population. Here is the results:

If all Democratic senators vote for reconciliation and all Republicans vote against reconciliation then reconciliation will pass by a population vote of 63% to 37%. In other words, senators representing 63% of Americans would have voted for reconciliation and health reform.

Even if some Democratic senators such as Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson, and independent Lieberman vote with the Republicans, reconciliation will still pass with a population vote of more than 60%--60.9% in fact.

So, Repubs shut up about your stupid argument about majorities vs super-majorities. We have a super majority in the senate for reconciliation.

See the CEPR analysis here: http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/reconciliation-2010-03.pdf

Listening to all the Repub nonsense I’ve come to the conclusion that what they really want is a change in the election laws and Congressional rules to make it possible for Republicans to win any election or vote in Congress with 40% of the vote while requiring Democrats to get 60%. That’s the way they behave.

Of course, some like Senator Bunning of Kentucky seems to think that we should require not a 60% vote but but something much higher to get anything done in the Senate or Congress. Let’s do the math.

The population of the U.S. is about 308,803,573.

The population of Kentucky is about 4,270,000.

So Bunning represents half of the citizens of Kentucky, roughly 2,135,000 citizens.

Now 2,135,000 divided by 308,803,573 is .0069 or 0.69%.

Now 100% - 0.69% is 99.31%

So in Bunning’s democracy, nothing can get done unless nearly 99.5% of the population wants it to get done. That’s a real SUPER DUPER majority. Of course, that’s ridiculous unless, of course, your real mission is life is to get nothing done as in you are a NO/Nothing. Bunning is. So are the rest of the NO/Nothing Repubs.