Democrats are going to use a slightly obscure but by-no-means unprecedented parliamentary procedure to pass health care reform through the House. The only reason to do this is because they are idiots.

The procedure is called "deem-and-pass" or "the self-executing rule," and it means that instead of passing the "rule" that decides the terms of debate on a bill and then passing the bill, the House will just pass the "rule" and consider the bill passed. It is a dumb quirk of our insanely complicated parliamentary system, and it's bad PR, but it's also been done "at least six times between 1989 and 2005" so it's not quite a threat to our democracy.

There are two different points of idiocy here. First, no matter what, the House is going to have to vote for health care reform before the Senate has passed the amendments that will make it better. So it really makes no sense to use a purposefully obtuse procedural rule that does nothing but give members a semantic "out" from saying they "voted for" the Senate bill. They need the same number of votes on the exact same package either way. They will be called socialist Nazis either way. I don't blame Nancy Pelosi for this nonsense, because she is just doing what she is supposed to do. But it's stupid.

But even more stupid is that they're letting the opposition define their actions in the press. The Republicans have all decided to call it "The Slaughter Rule" (after Rules committee head Louise Slaughter), which caught on like wildfire. But the real name is almost as bad: "deem-and-pass." (On the TV, it sounds like you are talking about demons!)

The Washington Post has referred to this as passing the bill "without voting on it," which is the most biased and negative possible spin. Because, guess what: they are going to vote on it. There will be a vote. The vote will be on the Health Care Reform bill. It will pass or fail with a simple majority. They just aren't going to vote on it twice.

It's really hard to get voters to care about process, but it's really easy to get journalists het up about it. The fun thing is that most journalists understand process about as well as voters, which is to say that they just believe either "pox on both houses everyone is corrupt wah wah wah" or they're convinced by whoever talked to them first and loudest. So far, Republicans have convinced them that "The Slaughter Rule" is a terrible injustice, and liberals are so baffled by the decision to use it that they're not defending it.

Still. It's not ideal, but if health care reform passes through some idiotic parliamentary procedure it will still be a net positive outcome for the vast majority of Americans. Of course, I would say that, as a Maoist.