Kent Conrad The Reconciliation Hypocrite Gets Embarrassed By The Wall Street Journal

A while back the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial called “Kent for Rent” about Senator Kent Conrad’s duplicitous stance on using the budget reconciliation process to pass sweeping policy reforms like health care. When that editorial hit, a reader emailed saying “Kent will probably responded with an outrageously outraged letter to the editor like he usually does.”
And sure enough, predictable as clockwork, Kent’s outrageously outraged letter appeared in the Journal today offering up a self-serving defense. But the Journal wasn’t about to let Conrad get away with that, and published another response:

A disapproving letter from Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad is one of those things that makes life worth living, and so we’re happy to give the North Dakotan a megaphone. All the more so since Mr. Conrad is making our point. …
…as the Senator well knows, reconciliation has been used frequently on annual budget bills by Democrats and Republicans, and we haven’t objected in either case. Our objection now is that reconciliation has never before been used to ram through such a momentous policy change as turning 17% of the economy over to government hands. Mr. Conrad admits in his letter that the only “intended purpose” of reconciliation is to “reduce deficits” and that “it is ill-suited for considering major policy reforms.” Which again raises the question of why he voted for it.

He voted for it because Obama told him to vote for it, and since he lives in a $3.1 million Delaware beach house (financed by a VIP loan from Countrywide Mortgage) and not the dumpy duplex in Bismarck (also financed by a VIP loan from Countrywide) he claims is his primary residence so he can fulfill the technical citizenship requirements of North Dakota, Obama is a lot easier to hear than North Dakotans.
This is my favorite part of the Journal’s response:

As for Mr. Conrad’s insistence that reconciliation will also be used for “deficit reduction,” we can only smile. So far this year, the self-described deficit hawk has voted for a $787 billion stimulus, a $33 billion increase in children’s health insurance, a $410 billion omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2009 and a $3.5 trillion 2010 budget outline. The only way to reconcile all of that is with a whopping tax increase, which is how the Senator has always defined “deficit reduction.”

Tax and spend.
Conrad wants to balance the budget…by taking all our money and putting it in the budget.