Judd Gregg: 'If you've got 51 votes, you win'

"The point is this," Sen. Judd Gregg says in this 2005 defense of the Republicans’ use of the budget reconciliation process. "If you've got 51 votes, you win."

The idea "that it is outside the rules to proceed within the rules," Gregg laughs, "is a very unique view on the rules." He's right! Sadly, he has now adopted that unique view on the rules, complaining that reconciliation is "running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River."

Obviously, Democrats were similarly hypocritical at the time, arguing that reconciliation was a terrible abuse of power. And so it goes: People start from their preferred outcome and then make up principles that support it. But at all times, the most convincing argument is the one Gregg uses above: Elections generally work on the principle that if you have 51 percent of the vote, you win. That's how we ratified the Constitution at the Massachusetts Convention. That's how we elected Scott Brown and Ronald Reagan. That's how the House of Representatives passes legislation. And it's how the Senate should work.

Reconciliation is a limited and strange process with problems of its own, however, and it would be far better for Democrats, Republicans and the country if we just dismantled the filibuster. Instead, we're left with a situation in which the minority uses a rule that wasn't supposed to be the way the Senate generally votes to impose a 60-vote requirement and the majority uses a process that wasn't meant to be the way the Senate debates to restore a 51-vote rule. Loser? The country, which gets worse policy made under worse circumstances.