Originally Posted by nation-x

It depends on who you listen to... of you listen to a "conservative" you will get the negative narrative and the exact opposite from the left. I never heard any democrat saying that the use of deem and pass was to avoid the vote... that all came from the right-wing. I heard dems say that they were trying to figure out a way to make sure that the "fixes" in the reconciliation bill would be guaranteed to pass... so they wanted to tie the two bills together... unfortunately for them, they weren't able to do that and bind the senate in the process. The complication is that if they don't use reconciliation, the GOP will just filibuster the bill and not allow a vote... so they can't go through conference... which is the normal process. If the GOP would just allow an up and down vote the dems wouldn't have to use reconciliation to bypass the filibuster...