Reply #82: You've got it mixed up. Reconciliation bills require only 50 votes. They don't need 60 Democrats.

[eomer]

The article you linked conveniently forgets that a reconciliation bill requires only 50 votes. There was in reality no need to count to 60. The magic number was 50.

There were 57 Democratic Senators at the time, plus Independent Senator Sanders who was in favor of the public option. So they needed a yes vote from 49 Democratic Senators out of 57, plus Sanders. They could have lost 8 Democratic Senators in all and still passed the bill with 50 votes.

There has been a very deliberate ploy of forgetting that the reconciliation process exists. This is what the corporate media does when Democrats are in the majority. They pretend that it takes 60 votes to do anything. What is more surprising is that Obama and other Democrats also keep putting out this lie, hoping that no one will know they could have actually done this and many other things with just 50 votes in the Senate.