Posted by
Defend America on Friday, March 05, 2010 4:32:11 PM
Myths about Reconciliation
Using reconciliation to pass Obamacare
would be inappropriate and unprecedented. Here’s why.
How could you tell when the Democrats had finally settled on the reconciliation route? It was at some point between the time
Harry Reid told
Republicans at the health-care summit that “nobody has talked about
reconciliation” and the time the White House stopped uttering the word
altogether.
But though their diction has changed, the Left
continues to perpetuate a number of myths about reconciliation that
should be dispelled before Democrats in Washington use the procedure to
force-feed the American people this $2.3 trillion behemoth.
Myth: Reconciliation is simply “majority rule.”
Democrats
have referred to the maneuver that dare not speak its name as simple
“majority rule.” In his March 3 speech, President Obama called for an
“up-or-down vote” on health-care reform requiring “nothing more than a
simple majority.”
White House
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told MSNBC the next day that in most
American households, “51 percent represents a majority viewpoint. I
don’t think that’s a crazy concept.” Ezra Klein
claimed that “a simple majority process” has been “key to getting anything done” in the Senate since the 90s.
But
this isn’t about lowering the thresholds for passage, as most
reconciliation measures initially pass the Senate with sizeable
majorities — sometimes even by voice vote or unanimous consent. Rather,
the process is explicitly about bypassing the Senate’s usual order of
business — an open debate and amendment process with an emphasis on
consent and consensus and robust protections for minority rights — to
ensure the speedy passage of budget-balancing legislation. As a result,
reconciliation measures are “privileged,” meaning that the Senate
must consider
them when they come to the floor. Likewise, debate on their substance
is strictly limited to 20 hours and amendments are allowed only insofar
as they address the contents of the measure itself (though, as author
Foster notes
here,
there is nothing to stop a determined minority from gumming up the
works indefinitely by forcing votes on the germaneness of extraneous
amendments).
There is nothing wrong with the principled use of
this “front-of-the-line” treatment for measures meant to bring
budgetary outlays in line with revenues, but in a Congress that
demonstrably no longer takes its duty to balance budgets seriously,
reconciliation is once again being abused as a matter of political
convenience.
The truth is that every single piece of successful
legislation to emerge from the Senate — via reconciliation or otherwise
— has done so via a final, up-or-down vote with a 50-plus-one
threshold. The debate about reconciliation is a debate about the path
to that vote. It’s about whether the Senate is and ought to be
something more than a slightly smaller, slightly crustier House of
Representatives.
http://article.nationalreview.com/427048/myths-about-reconciliation/daniel-foster-stephen-spruiell