No doubt John Boehner is well aware of that public contempt. Watching the minority leader speak on the House floor, pretending to be a populist demagogue rather than a corporate stooge, his anger seemed less provoked by the specifics of the healthcare legislation than with its likely political impact. If he feels so confident that the people will massively repudiate this bill in the midterm election -- and thus make him speaker --why was he so furious? Why did the bill’s imminent passage turn his usual orangey-tan complexion almost incandescent red with rage?

The answer could be found in the subtext of Boehner’s speech, which did not dwell on the bill’s specific provisions, beyond its alleged expense. He knows that arguing the bill’s specific provisions is very dangerous to his party, because so many of them are quite popular and the public will hold Republicans in disrepute for opposing them.

An informed public was always the ultimate peril for the Republicans in this process, so distorted during the past year by wild propaganda about death panels, government takeovers, and the entire mythology of the Obama administration’s socialist-communist-Nazi-totalitarianism.

Creating those crazy expectations was a strategy that depended on the bill never passing. If and when people learn what is actually in the legislation, many of them will realize that they were misled, and will end up appreciating most of what the Democrats have passed, after all.

Certainly that possibility is what  troubles David Frum, who expressed his fears yesterday evening in a post titled “Waterloo” (after the triumphal predictions of Sen. Jim DeMint of the consequences for Obama if healthcare reform were to be defeated). Before he became notorious for writing war-mongering speeches for President Bush, Frum was admired among conservatives for uttering unvarnished criticisms of his own movement, notably in a 1995 book titled  "Dead Right" (a passionate screed that urged the party toward deeper ideological consistency -- much the opposite of his current complaint).

The Republicans bet on killing healthcare reform and lost, says Frum -- and by November, voters will come to understand the appealing aspects of the legislation, even as the broader economic and political environment improves for Democrats. Now he warns, “It's a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November -- by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.”

Frum is harshly realistic about the chances to reverse this historic step forward: “No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the ‘doughnut hole’ and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year-olds from their parents' insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there -- would President Obama sign such a repeal?”

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira  found hard evidence that underscores Frum’s fears in a public opinion experiment undertaken by Newsweek last month. The magazine’s pollsters first asked respondents whether they support or oppose the president’s healthcare reform plan, with predictable results: 40 percent in favor, 49 percent opposed, 11 percent undecided.

Then the pollsters described major aspects of the bill -- the insurance exchanges, the strict regulation of insurance company policies, the requirement for insurance with government assistance to those who need help, the tax on expensive plans, the fines on those who don’t get insurance, and the public option. Not only did most of those aspects of the bill poll favorably, but the overall legislation ticked up by 8 points when the pollsters asked the same people again whether they support or oppose it. The second time reversed the initial results: 48 percent in favor, 43 percent opposed, 9 percent unsure.

That sharp turnaround in opinion occurred in a matter of minutes during a telephone call with a stranger. Now the president and the congressional Democrats have seven months to make the same argument, and smart Republicans are properly terrified that they will. 

Boehner and his fellow Republicans are furious with the CBO today because its latest report on healthcare reform says that the bill Democrats are preparing to pass over the weekend will cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next 10 years and by well over a trillion dollars in the following decade. Its reassurance on cost savings is expected to encourage wavering Democrats to vote yes. So last night, Boehner told Fox News that the CBO findings are nothing but "a fallacy" -- and others like Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele have gone further, accusing CBO of promoting "a lie."

Yet when CBO director Douglas Elmendorf testified last July that one version of the Democrats' healthcare bill would not achieve budgetary savings, every Republican leader and right-wing media figure in Washington praised his "devastating" analysis. At the time, Boehner said the CBO director's remarks proved "that one of the Democrats' chief talking points is pure fiction" and his office devoted an excited  press release to coverage of Elmendorf’s testimony. Its headline: "Exposed: CBO Confirms Democrats' Plan Will Increase Americans’ Health Care Costs." 

Echoing the Boehner line back then were all the usual suspects, from the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, et cetera, who described Elmendorf's testimony as a death blow to health reform. 

Boehner still loved the CBO when it released a somewhat favorable analysis of the GOP's health proposals (which he quoted very selectively). But today the thrill is gone. 

Meanwhile, one of Washington's most respected economic policy analysts, Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, issued a statement today endorsing the bill. He is a progressive whose integrity and rigor have been recognized across the political spectrum for many years and what he says is worth reading in full. 

According to him, voter revulsion "will be enough to eradicate an entire generation of House and Senate Democrats ... This is the prospect the House and Senate Democrats who vote for Obamacare will face in the fall of 2010. This is the record they will have to defend. Or, they could save their political lives and vote no!"

Such hysterics must be expected from every carnival barker in Fox Nation, especially a featured player like Morris – and the shrill rhetoric surely helps to separate the rubes from their money, in this case through donations to the League of American Voters, sponsor of this morning’s e-mail and many more from him.

Scamming aside, however, a prediction is a prediction, and Democratic legislators preparing to vote yea on reform should be comforted whenever Morris prognosticates their demise, because he is dead wrong with almost perfect consistency.

Only two months ago, following the election of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate special election, the excitable Morris looked into his crystal ball and  told Fox listeners that he had seen the effective end of Obama’s presidency. "Let’s just stop for a second and understand the magnitude of the earthquake that hit Massachusetts ... ultimately, this is the end of the Obama ascendancy, he will never get another major piece of legislation passed," he pronounced. (Which must mean that the healthcare bill is almost certain to pass next weekend.)

During the 2008 election cycle, Morris offered many forecasts, none of which were right. Early on he picked Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani as almost certain nominees of their respective parties and trashed John McCain as a sure loser. In January 2007, he told an audience of conservative journalists: "I think what's going to happen in the world is that Hillary's going to be the next president." Not too long after that, he and wife Eileen McGann wrote a column for the New York Post headlined "It’s Now a Rudy Romp." A year later, he was predicting that Clinton would crash and burn in the New Hampshire primary, right up to the evening before that election. Her tears had proved to voters that she was unfit to serve as president, he explained. When she won the following night, he overreacted again by predicting that she would surely go on to secure the nomination. (Back when Clinton was running for the U.S. Senate from New York in the 2000 cycle, Morris similarly made one delusional prediction after another, claiming that she would never run, withdraw, falter, lose, and so on. She ran and won, of course.)

Among Dick’s wackiest blunders in recent years was his confident assertion -- on the eve of the 2006 midterm election -- that North Korea would become the overriding issue in that campaign, eclipsing taxes, the war in Iraq, and Republican corruption. As Glenn Greenwald observed back then in a mordant post: "It's just not possible to be more wrong than this."

By Election Day, Dick had forgotten about North Korea and could no longer ignore the unanimity of polls showing that the Republicans were on the verge of a historic defeat. (He occasionally gets it right, if he waits until moments before the polls close to place his bet.)

Part of Dick’s problem, in the years since he sold out completely to the Republicans, is his irrepressible urge to spin rather than analyze. This has led him to some fantastically stupid conjectures, captured on video. One of my favorites came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when President Dubya made a desultory speech in New Orleans.

On Fox News, Morris rated the weak speech as "fantastic!" Building up a head of steam, he cruelly raised Republican hopes. "The people who said this storm is going to hurt Bush's presidency," he declared, "are just wrong." Defying polls that showed the president’s public approval scraping bottom, he went on to assure listeners that the Katrina fiasco would be nothing more than "a distant memory," while the city’s recovery would prove to be "a huge positive for Bush. That will be a second term legacy ... [Bush] can get all the money he wants out of Congress 'cause of this disaster, the people will be solidly behind him, the media will cover it like crazy and he's gonna look like Santa Claus."

Obviously he pulls a lot of these prognostications straight out of his butt, with no polling or expertise required. Certainly there are plenty of polls showing that the Democrats will face serious trouble come fall (although there are also surveys showing a hint of daylight now, too). But when someone like Morris warns of catastrophe, there just may be reason for optimism. 

Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status, and vice versa. But I can’t recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of "deem and pass."

That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration.

To be fair, Ornstein prefers the "regular order" and thus won’t endorse the use of a self-executing rule by the Democrats to pass health care reform. "But even so," he asks, "is there no shame anymore?"

For those who wish we could all just get along, the use of the self-executing rule is among the few things that can be honestly called "bipartisan." So says Donald Wolfensberger, who served on the Republican staff of the House Rules Committee for nearly two decades and as its chief of staff during the 104th Congress, after Newt Gingrich became speaker, in a brief but detailed column that he wrote for Roll Call.

He also posted that  essay on the Web site of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he runs the Congress Project:

When Republicans were in the minority, they railed against self-executing rules as being anti-deliberative because they undermined and perverted the work of committees and also prevented the House from having a separate debate and vote on the majority’s preferred changes. From the 95th to 98th Congresses (1977-84), there were only eight self-executing rules making up just 1 percent of the 857 total rules granted. However, in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s (D-Mass.) final term in the 99th Congress, there were 20 self-executing rules (12 percent). In Rep. Jim Wright’s (D-Texas) only full term as Speaker, in the 100th Congress, there were 18 self-executing rules (17 percent). They reached a high point of 30 under Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) during the final Democratic Congress, the 103rd, for 22 percent of all rules.

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). [Naturally, Gingrich can now be seen everywhere on cable television complaining about such mischief.] There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

Wolfensberger was inspired by a 2006 episode when the Republican majority -- in order to secure their own loophole-ridden, watered-down version of ethics and lobbying reform -- used not just one but three self-executing rules on a single bill.

Those convoluted moves were necessary to remove previously approved provisions that would have mandated disclosure of lobbyists’ contacts with members and staff, and lobbyists’ solicitation and transmission of campaign contributions to candidates, as well as a third amendment ordering the Government Accountability Office to study lobbyist employment contracts.

Four years ago is not ancient history. The same Republican leaders now roaring furiously about the self-executing rule were in the GOP leadership that used it so vigorously when they held power, including, of course, John Boehner. If we add up Wolfensberger’s numbers, Boehner’s team used the self-executing rule -- which he now denounces as a "twisted scheme" -- well over 100 times.  

The proper reply to "death panels" was that they already exist in the corporate bureaucracy of the insurance companies -- and in the lobbying firms where reform that would save tens of thousands of lives annually has been killed every time.

And the short answer to "backroom deals" -- as well as all the other complaints about process in the House and the Senate -- is that the Republicans have used many of the same tactics and worse whenever that suited them and certainly will again if they regain power next fall.

That was why I had to stifle a laugh this morning when Joe Scarborough asked me on his radio show (and later on "Morning Joe," too) why the alleged abuse of parliamentary maneuvers didn't cause me to worry about the future. "Won't this give the Republicans the excuse to use the same tactics when they win the majority and John Boehner becomes speaker?" he demanded. But then Joe had to laugh when I asked whether he doubted that the Republicans would use whatever tactics suited their agenda -- no matter what the Democrats do now -- just as they did when he was in Congress. He knows they will.

(Scarborough also asked, perhaps sincerely, why the insurance companies haven't run their own "Harry and Louise" campaign to kill this bill if they actually hate it and don't secretly see it as a subsidy to them. The answer is that Frank Luntz warned last year against raising the industry's profile in a debate where they are the entities most despised by the public -- and that they have instead run their campaign against reform through other corporate outfits, notably the mammoth U.S. Chamber of Commerce.)

The will to stand and fight is the fundamental difference between the parties, which the current struggle over healthcare may yet begin to bring into closer balance. At the moment, too many elected Democrats pay too much heed to David Brooks and the editorial page editors of the Washington Post, whose chief purpose in life is to oppose their interests and objectives. Democrats constantly worry that they won't seem sufficiently "bipartisan" and "responsible" if they employ the legislative and procedural tactics required to achieve their aims and enforce majority rule. Democrats are afraid to look bad.

Republicans think David Brooks is a wuss, to put it politely, but at least he is their wuss. Republicans openly proclaim that bipartisanship is merely another cynical ploy, only to be used and then discarded in their quest to "defeat the left" -- a quest that to them has always meant dismantling the progressive achievements of the past century via permanent one-party rule. Republicans rarely worry whether they look bad to anyone beyond their narrow ideological base.

It's a style that can lead to excess and often does. But the Democrats may at last get something done this week by emulating it. And they may be surprised by the respect they earn from the public -- and from their adversaries -- by standing up with strength for what they claim to believe most deeply.

Fortunately, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has studied Ryan's proposals with its usual perspicacity and issued a clear warning that his road map would only lead us -- after a series of hard-right turns -- to the same old plutocratic dead end. Like so many Republican speeches about fiscal responsibility, the Ryan promise to balance the budget is a scam whose real purpose has more to do with redistributing taxes downward and wealth upward -- that is, more of the same.

The CBPP report is bracing in its candor about what we might actually expect from enacting Ryan's plan -- as opposed to its advertised effects. The middle-class tea party types who believe the Republicans will save them from high taxes and big deficits should know that Ryan's plan will not lead to fiscal balance someday, but in fact is more likely to balloon both deficits and debt until well after 2070.

What should be even more disturbing, from the tea party perspective, is that the Ryan plan sharply raises federal taxes on the middle class by imposing a value-added or sales tax. It raises taxes on the consumption of items like tea, quite literally. By definition such taxes are regressive, falling much more heavily on working- and middle-income families than on the rich, unless they include specific features to make them more equitable (which the Ryan version does not).

The fiscal analysis used by the CBPP found that three out of four Americans, with incomes between $20,000 and $200,000, would see their taxes go up, not down, if Ryan's plan replaced current law.

Indeed, the reason that Ryan's plan cannot balance the budget is quite simple. (And as CBPP points out in responding to Ryan's whiny complaints, the only way he can claim it would is to quote a wildly skewed revenue estimate conjured up by his own research staff.) 

While raising the taxes of middle-class families via the sales tax, it reduces taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans -- those with incomes over $633,000 -- by half. The wealthiest taxpayers would receive larger and larger tax cuts going up the income scale, with the richest one-tenth of 1 percent, with annual incomes above $2.9 million, receiving an average tax cut of $1.7 million per year. And these generous cuts would be in addition to the benefits that the nation's very wealthiest households would get from making permanent the Bush tax cuts, which are supposed to expire at the end of this year.

As a result of these changes, middle-class taxpayers would end up paying a larger percentage of their annual income to the government than now, while the wealthiest taxpayers would pay a smaller percentage. According to the CBPP -- which many conservatives acknowledge for its tradition of honesty and accuracy -- Ryan's plan would damage health coverage for most Americans and endanger if not destroy the safety net for the elderly, whose rise from mass poverty began with Social Security and Medicare.

This is what passes for "populism" on the Republican right.