Not to nitpick, Jonah, but the actual number of people writing about health-care today is 50,000,002 — as Stephen and I have polished off our Tractatus on the reconciliation process: “Five Myths About Reconciliation.”

It is, we desperately hope, the last article you will ever need to read on the process. But if you are some kind of perverted masochist who just can’t get enough legislative arcana, check out this fact sheet from House Republicans on the Budget Committee, which situates the Democrats’ current effort within the history of the budget reconciliation rules. And watch Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.), continually the GOP’s most credible and able voice on the budget, put that case to Fox News on Wednesday.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent on the GOP’s plan to suffocate a reconciliation effort with mulitple Byrd Rule points of order:

At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.
That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process further.
“The bottom line is that it is incredibly difficult to craft a reconciliation bill on health care that isn’t subject to multiple Byrd rule violations,” says one senior Senate GOP aide, who was granted anonymity to preview their strategy. “House Dems are likely to be voting on a reconciliation bill multiple times.”
There’s a larger game plan here. By making it clear they will do their best to tie reconciliation in procedural knots, Republicans are hoping to frighten House Dems into believing reconciliation is doomed. If House Dems are persuaded that the fix later will fail, they will be less likely to pass the original Senate bill in the first place, pehaps killing it.

Live by reconciliation, die by reconciliation.