Fox's Smith suggests viewers better off Googling "reconciliation" than following his network's coverage of it

Gotta Love Shep.

I hope Shepard Smith's got a new job lined up. Talk like this will get you fired from Fox Shep.. Easy there feller..
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Very weak effort by S. Smith...

He looked very wimpy.

And this guy is supposed to be the "liberal" anchor that Murdoch allows on his network. Give me a break!

Now, now Shep, you really need to start watching what you say. The rest of the asylum over there at Fox Noise may out you as sane.

Oh crap, that's not gonna help his ratings!

Either this is a lame attempt by Fox to try and look 'fair and balanced'...

Or Shep is doing his level best to get the hell out of Dodge?

I don't know why Smith is still with Fox. He has progressive blood in him; he needs to detach himself from that corporation to express his opinion openly.

Carl,

Our founding fathers never said that we need 60 votes to make law - 51 votes, my friend.

The filibuster has been abused in the past two years by Republicans attempting to thwart democracy.

Shep,

You are moving up my list. Well done. (Still a ways to go, but you are getting there.)

The GOP has made it glaringly clear that they are going to obstruct for solely political reasons (i.e.; Grassley), and this idea that reconciliation has only been used for tax cuts and Supreme Court fights is not wholly accurate. I know that it was used in the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act" which was heavily pushed as part of the Republican "Contract With America" and signed by President Clinton. This act completely changed the welfare system and was not merely budgetary. Republicans compaining about reconciliation must be taken with a grain of salt, since they have been more than willing to use it themselves in the past.

I also noticed that Cameron again falsely, and without much of a correction from Smith, conflated reconciliation with "the nuclear option." I have no particular beef with Shep Smith, but I agree with the poster above who stated that this was a weak effort on his behalf. I've seen him do better. Still, it's Fox, so I guess you take what you can get.

Oh, and the person who coined the phrase "nuclear option" was Republican Trent Lott; it was threatened by Bill Frist back in 2005 and loudly cheered on as a tactic by much of the political right. Their horror of it now is more than a little ironic.

Would this put him on BPITW or WPITW?

Fox's Smith suggests viewers better off Googling "reconciliation" than following his network's coverage of it

So -- Sheepdog is actually admitting that his own network is incapable of actual coverage of an issue.

How refreshing.

Media Matters might want to revise their titling of this, and while it does explain the issue well, it lacks any significant bias. Shepard Smith at the end said that people would better off googling the term than listening to "me." There didn't seem to be any mention of the network. Obviously the editorial programs that are on later will have a different, and possibly slanted perspective on the possibility of its use and on its use in the past, but he was referring to himself, and not those other programs. I don't know why, it seemed as if he did a reasonable, albeit limited and superficial, job covering the term and the implications of its use.

Reconciliation is not the "nuclear option"! The nuclear option was the attempt by the Republicans to do away with the filibuster altogether, so that *all* Senate votes would require just 51 votes.

First of all, Reconciliation isn't the Nuclear Option. The Nuclear Option is re-writing the Senate filibustering rules, which the Republic party threatened to do.

Reconcilation, as Shep said, has been done plenty of times in the past by the Bush Administration. It doesn't have to have anything to do with finance or a budget. Majority rules. And, the Republic Party is a regional party that doesn't matter anymore. Who cares if they get angry about anything? What are they going to do about it that they're not doing now?

Screw them. Use Majority Rules and get it done.

I love how the rules of Senate gets all twisted in the media.

According to the Constitution. The rule of Senate is majority passes. That's 51 votes. In case of a tie, the VPOTUS breaks the tie.

This 60% nonsense came from the Filibuster procedural rule where a 40% minority could stall a bill by the minority party endlessly talking which would prevent a bill to pass. But, in the past, the minority group would have to take turns and endlessly talk about something, as long as the senate was in session. This made politicians look ridiculous as the read the Rules of Golf, or Company Manuals or famous books from literature. In 2000, they changed the procedural rule and got rid of the actual procedure.

This made it easy for the minority party to filibuster without putting forth any effort. They just had to declare it. This fundamentally changed the Constitution and it has gone unchallenged. It changed the passage of law from 51% to 60%.

But, they made an exception to the filibuster rule when it came to budgetary bills that they then called Reconciliation.

So now.. as the media purports... 60% to pass is the rule and Reconciliation (or worse yet) the Nuclear Option is 51%.

The Consitution says 51%... that's the law.

sigh... this whole thing makes my head hurt.

BAM!

nuclear option
n. especially in politics, an action of last resort; in recent years in the U.S., an extreme method of overcoming a filibuster related to the confirmation of judicial nominees. By definition, reconciliation is not the "nuclear option." I hate how Fox likes to twist words. The other day, I was listening to fox and friends, and they worked the word reconciliation twice in a news story about the bomber that was released in Scotland. It was a blatant attempt to demonize this word every time it is mentioned.