To follow up on Mike H, reconciliation in this instance almost certainly means budget reconciliation. The House would pass the Senate’s version of health care, and the President would sign it into law. Then any changes that the Democrats want to make would be rolled into another bill that would be considered under budget reconciliation rules which could not be filibustered.
Technically, you are right. Effectively, however, that means a 2/3 majority is required to reduce the requirements to bring cloture . You don’t think the Republicans would filibuster a change to the rules requiring only a 59% majority to invoke cloture? If the Democrats weren’t able to get 60 votes to get the Health Care bill to pass, how are they going to get 67 votes to changes rules so it is only necessary to get 59 votes for it to pass? And if they had the 67 votes to change the rules…
ETA : This is in response to pan1’s post on Senate rules on changing the rules
I would say right on the first part: many people are erroneously saying that reconciliation is the process of taking two bills and making them one. While in plain English “reconciliation” means to find a compromise solution, when the word is used in a parliamentary sense, that definition is wrong.
Reconciliation is a specific legislative process that is intended to make certain changes to the budget in order to make earlier estimates of spending and revenue match newer estimates. Think of it as making mid-year changes to your own household budget based upon you getting less income, or spending more, than you thought you would at the beginning of the year.
The correct term for taking two bills and making them into one is “conferencing,” or “to conference,” and that is done in a conference committee.
If the House accepted the Senate proposal as-is, they could vote on it, approve it by a majority, and send it on to the President with no need for another Senate vote. However, it is unlikely that Congress could then go back and make substantive policy changes to the legislation by the reconciliation process, which prohibits filibusters. This is because large parts of the bill are matters of policy, not changes to the budget. The Byrd Rule in the Senate prohibits “extraneous matter” in reconciliation bills that, among other things, do not have an effect on spending or revenue.
Finally, the proposal floated in liberal circles to change Senate rules on the filibuster or cloture by majority vote was very intently debated a few years ago. Then, this exact same proposal was known as “the nuclear option,” and a bipartisan group of 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans sank the effort to change the rules by majority vote, in addition to the opposition of every Democrat in the Senate at the time. The idea that Democrats would turn around and use the nuclear option to change the filibuster rules to their advantage is 100% fantasy.
He has to be seated by the Senate before he can vote on anything. That doesn’t happen automatically – it has to be scheduled and voted on by the Senate. The democrats, with 59 votes, could delay that until after the Healthcare bill is voted on, if they want.
Coming from Minnesota, where the republicans managed to delay seating our newly-elected Senator for about 7 months, we are well aware of this.
Maybe: that’s what some Democrats are suggesting. But it’s not as easy as that - Barney Frank and other Democrat politicians have said that delaying Brown’s certification simply isn’t possible, and that whoever wins the race will be certified by the end of January.
Could you explain a bit more about this? If there’s no filibuster in the budget reconciliation, and if the majority party can “roll changes” to healthcare into it, why don’t liberal Democrats add the public option that way? Or remove the Stupak amendment against federally-insured abortion that way? Or do whatever else they want for that matter?
How would a filibuster work? Can a pair or 3 senators take turns talking, or does each person get one chance to talk, then when they run out of steam they’re done? Is a filibuster infinite, or limited by 49 senators’ biological limitations?
(Do they get pee breaks during a 48-hour speech, or wear Depends?)
It used to be that they were limited by a single politician’s biological limitations, and thus were used only in the most extreme cases. Nowadays, though, it’s just a matter of saying “I’m filibustering”, unless 60 senators agree otherwise. Effectively, what they did was they eliminated the true filibuster, and replaced it with a de facto requirement for a 60% supermajority.
Wouldn’t work. The requirement for cloture is “at least 60%”, not “over 59%”, and 59/99 = 59.6%, short of the required amount. They’d still need 60 votes.
7 Dems and 7 Pubbies. Not 6.
See my previous post. The Byrd Rule prohibits “extraneous” matter from being put in a reconciliation bill. Extraneous matter, very generally speaking, are policy provisions that do not produce changes to spending or revenues. It is safe to say that a good number of key policy provisions of any health care bill would run afoul of the Byrd Rule, therefore the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process can’t effectively be used.
So, to state it as simply as I can, the Senate could filibuster-proof the money to pay for a public option, but it can’t filibuster-proof the provisions of law that would establish the bureaucracy for a public option.
JM: Good catch, 14, not 12.
OK, so you’re saying they could add some of the cost-control measures (like the excise tax?) through budget reconciliation, but they couldn’t make changes to something not directly related to the budget, like the insurance exchanges.
What about repealing the Stupak amendment that ensures federal funds cannot be used for abortion? That relates directly to how federal funds can be spent, so wouldn’t that change be admissible via the budget reconciliation process?
IIRC the Senate Parliamentarian rules on what is and isn’t kosher. Stuff like the excise tax is probably a gimme, but Stupak may or may not be okay. It isn’t random, since there are rules governing what’s acceptable, but you wouldn’t really know on borderline things until the Parliamentarian issues a ruling. Naturally the Senate prefers to avoid potential problems and the unknowns of what can get put in (budget) reconciliation could prove a huge headache that’s to be avoided if at all possible.
It comes down to a question of whether the provision actually saves any money compared to what we are spending today. I have a hard time seeing how it does, in which case, it would be extraneous and run afoul of the Byrd Rule. The factual question of whether/how much money the provision would save would be determined through the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office.
ETA: And as mentioned above, the Senate Parliamentarian would rely on the CBO estimate.
If Brown wins, I don’t think the house could pass the Senate bill.
There are enough moderates who would realize they’d need to start looking for a new job.
In fact, it may have reached that point already.
I specifically requested that no one give me answers like this. Please don’t offer me your thoughts again unless they’re relevant.
Thanks Ravenman and MeDrewNotYou, I wasn’t aware about the Senate Parliamentarian or the Byrd Rule.
No you didn’t… please make your rules more clear next time.
It is possible that since Mass. residents already have universal health care, they may view a national bill doing the same as the imposition of taxes to fund other states when they are already paying for it locally.
You might also want to check out Congress Matters. It has a liberal/progressive bias, but David Waldman probably knows more about how Congress works than half the politicians up there. He often talks about legislative procedure and strategy which is a big help in understanding why Congress does some of the weirder/less comprehensible things it does.