Jamison Foser takes a look back to the most recent legitimately questionable use of the reconciliation process, the Bush tax cuts, to gauge what must have been a veritable torrent of “end of democracy” style editorials and hard-hitting analytical articles and investigations. Right?

The Senate reconciliation vote occurred on May 23, 2003. In the month of May, only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation for the tax cuts — a May 13, 2003, article that devoted a few paragraphs to wrangling over whether Senate Republicans could assign the bill number they wanted (S.2) to a bill approved via reconciliation. The Times also used the word “reconciliation” in a May 9, 2003, editorial, but gave no indication whatsoever of what it meant.

And that’s more attention than most news outlets gave to the use of reconciliation that month. The Washington Post didn’t run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words “reconciliation” and “senate.” Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent.

Cable news didn’t care, either. CNN ran a quote by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the substance of the tax cuts in which he used the word “reconciliation” in passing — but that was it. Fox News aired two interviews in which Republican members of Congress referred to the reconciliation process in order to explain why the tax cuts would be temporary, but neither they nor the reporters interviewing them treated reconciliation as a controversial tactic.

And ABC, CBS, NBC? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Yep. This time around? Well, that’s totally different, of course:

the media are referring to reconciliation as the “nuclear option” and portraying it as an obscure procedural gimmick being considered in an attempt to circumvent Senate rules and “ram” health care legislation through Congress. The conservative media are going so far as to claim that use of reconciliation would be “unprecedented.”

The Democrat has got to work on its messaging. It’s all that matters. The GOP has sewn the earth with salt re: governance and, really, any sense of shared civic concern whatsoever for over two decades. Any chance to poison the perceived relationship between citizen and government has been used to reassure the populace that government never, ever can provide anything to the governed that couldn’t be better provided by the private citizen.
An equally ferocious, equally long-term effort will be required to reacquaint people with the everyday things that evil big government is doing for them. Most of which are directly enabling enraged GOP voters to live the solitary, exurban lifestyles that make up so much of the current GOP base. That the western “Red” states are livable at all: entirely the result of government spending and ostentatiously generous water policy. Period. That no one living in those states seems to realize this: the fault of the Democrat, and dangerous for the country. This (and messaging on a thousand issues just like it), more than anything, needs to be rectified. And soon.