Posted by
Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 10:21:13 AM
Senior
Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they
hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to
use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to
death and ensure that it never passes.
Senior GOP aides have been
studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game
plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.
At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule
is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make
budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming
the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a
reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to
pass that fix, too.
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.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/senate-republicans/gop-strategy-bleed-reconciliation-fix-to-death-with-byrd-rule/