Regarding doing health care before tax cuts: Wasn’t there also something about the fact that they had to use the savings they got by slashing Medicaid and subsidies to offset the tax cuts in order to keep them revenue neutral so they could be passed via reconciliation as well? Or maybe I’m remembering.
Not sure that’s a viable law. Art I, Sec 5 provides, “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings…”
I actually started thinking about that after I made that post. I was wondering whether a law passed through reconciliation, but in a blatant disregard for the statute, could be struck down, or whether any procedural question before the courts would be discarded under Art I sec 5. My conclusion was that we will most likely never know.
They’d need 50 or 51 votes to eliminate the filibuster. To my knowledge at least 3 GOP senators have come out in favor of keeping the filibuster, so they probably can’t get that done.
The democrats will probably lose seats in the senate in 2018, but they’ll gain seats in the house. Even if they do not win the house (which seems unlikely) they’ll shrink the GOP margin, making it harder to pass ACA repeal in 2019 and 2020. The GOP passed ACA repeal in the house by 2 votes while having 23 votes more than the minimum needed to pass legislation.
On the other hand, the law was passed by the houses of the legislature. One might argue that the Senate chose to exercise its Art I, Sec 5 power by means of passing the law.
The bill that originally passed the House included a public option. It was the Senate that wouldn’t consider the public option (though that was a question of the filibuster rather than a constitutional majority of the Senate voting against a bill with the public option) so the House had to accept the Senate’s no-public-option bill. That in turn was followed by a bill to amend the now-passed Senate bill which could be passed by the reconciliation process (and therefore couldn’t be filibustered). But we basically wound up with a patched version of the more conservative Senate bill, rather than the arguably more progressive bill the House had already passed.
American legislative sausage-making at its finest!
Obamacare is going to die eventually. Either Trump and the GOP will kill it indirectly by destabilizing health markets to the point where insurers lose faith in it, or they’ll just kill the filibuster, an outcome that became more likely with last night’s election in Alabama. Trump’s America will just continue to get Trumpier, and it doesn’t give a damn about civil liberties, equal rights, or democracy. This is white radical christian America’s last stand and they’re not going down without a fight.