Progressive activists like Paul Krugman and Steve Benen have been promoting a remarkable reaction to the success of a conservative arguments against health care reform packages — double down on progressive purism by passing the Senate bill and then make it more compliant with costly progressive demands for government-regulated “public option” health care by using reconciliation to circumvent a Senate filibuster.

Even leaving aside the practical problems with this plan (using reconciliation would still require some procedural votes that could be filibustered), the plan proposed by Benen is remarkably stupid in political terms. What it amounts to is, having already politically stabbed themselves in the gut by drastically overreaching with massive spending proposals coupled to a massive increase in the regulatory power of the government over individual lives, now they demand Democrats twist the knife and spread the damage. More moderate Democratic Senators would be asked to fall on their political swords just so a few intolerant hard-line progressive purists could run the table.

At the point that voters in one of the nation’s bluest states were persuaded by conservative criticisms that the Democrats’ health reform plan was too costly and too repressive of individual liberties, progressives like Krugman and Benen are insisting that using blatant procedural tricks to make it more costly and more repressive is the only way to “save the Democratic Party”.

Whatever they’re smoking needs to be debated more under the rubric of drug legalization than health care reform.