Barack Obama's opponents view defeating healthcare reform as their ticket to recapturing power, with one Republican Senator infamously declaring that it would be the president's "Waterloo". Efforts by Republicans to feign interest in real reform by seeking to slow the progress of the bill or start over are nothing more than thinly veiled efforts to undermine the scope of reform and preserve the status quo. As a result of this increasingly polarised political landscape, Democrats are now signalling that they may pass part of the healthcare bill without Republican support by splitting the bill into two more manageable pieces.

The first part would include insurance reform and could be passed with broader approval. The second, more controversial bill would involve substantive reform and may include a government-run "public option" or nonprofit cooperative that would compete with private insurers. Passing the more contentious part of reform would require using a budget device called "reconciliation" that would enable the bill to pass by simple majority rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Talk of using reconciliation has Republicans crying foul, calling it the "nuclear option", as well as an "end run" around the democratic process. It's difficult to take seriously protests that are so clearly hypocritical in the face of years of strong-arm Republican legislative tactics that used this same same tool on at least four occasions involving tax cuts and oil drilling. Moreover, George Bush's Senate allies once denounced the filibuster as the "formula for tyranny by the minority" and downplayed reconciliation as simply the "constitutional option".

If ever there was a time in our history important enough to consider using such a tool, it is fighting to ease the suffering of our fellow citizens. The healthcare town hall meetings where angry Republicans compare Obama to Hitler represent why this is a difficult issue.

The larger problem is that it's difficult to make all the important players in the process happy when many of them have mutually exclusive positions. The American Medical Association, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and hospital groups are not all on the same page. Consensus-building will not only water down any final bill but it will benefit the few at the expense of many.

The fact that reconciliation lowers the threshold for passing legislation does not mean it's an undemocratic tool, particularly in a situation where the process is the enemy. There's nothing democratic about requiring a supermajority of 60 votes to pass a bill. Moreover, it may even be somewhat generous to say reconciliation permits an up or down vote. Passing a bill by simple majority would still require that legislation survive numerous committees in both the Senate and the House, conference committees to reconcile different versions of the bill in each chamber and a final conference committee between both chambers.

At each chokepoint in the legislative process, legislation can be killed before it's ever given an up or down vote on the floor. The filibuster is nothing more than an informal rule which is often used to stand in the way of progress, such as in 1957 when Strom Thurmond attempted to block the Civil Rights Act. Reconciliation, while procedurally nothing more than a form of sleight of hand, is substantively a democratic idea.

Obama and his democratic allies won the election in no small measure because he ran on healthcare reform with a public option. He was unsuccessfully attacked many times for being a "socialist", so to label the current healthcare proposal as such is nothing more than a second bite at the electoral apple.

Healthcare reform isn't about bringing the country together. It's about making good on a promise to change this country for the better. The president's opponents do not fight for the sake of their ideals, but for political advantage and a handful of powerful corporations fighting to keep profits made on the backs of the sick and dying. This debate is full of passion, but now is the time to assert the political influence the American people gave Democrats in 2008.

When the dust settles and the talk of "death panels" has subsided, Democrats and Republicans will be judged on election day by a simple majority of their constituents, nothing more and nothing less. Using reconciliation in the healthcare debate simply provides that same fairness for members of Congress representing the American people.