Dems can take reconciliation route

Opinion: February 23, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By GEORGE CURRY

President Obama’s renewed effort to revive health-care-reform legislation by calling for a bipartisan summit Thursday may be headed to the waiting room, as Republicans threaten to opt out if Democrats don’t abandon measures already passed by the House and Senate.

But Obama doesn’t necessarily need Republican support.

Democrats in the House and Senate can pass health-care reform — and the rest of Obama’s agenda — by insisting on majority rule instead of the 60-vote supermajority that it lost in the Senate with the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

Until now, the 58 Democrats and two independents who regularly caucus with them in the Senate provided Obama with a filibuster-proof margin. Along the way, however, it was not a pretty picture, with moderate Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana receiving the equivalent of political ransom for their belated support of health-care reform. To satisfy Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Democrats abandoned the public option aimed at restraining rising health-care costs.

What lies ahead

In November, as is usually the case in off-year elections, Democrats as the party in power are expected to lose seats in the House and Senate, further eroding their power in Congress.

Still, the party is expected to retain a majority in both chambers — and they have the White House. But you’d never know it by the unwillingness of Democrats to firmly take the reins of power.

Though it takes 60 votes to end a filibuster, there is another process known as budget reconciliation, in which debate must end within a set time limit — 20 hours in the Senate — and requires a simple majority to pass a measure.

Writing in the New Republic, political scholars Thomas Mann, Molly Reynolds, and Norman Ornstein observed, “The best path would be to have reconciliation as an implicit threat: If Democrats can employ it to accomplish the policy goal with only a simple majority, Republicans may be persuaded to abandon efforts to use their 41 votes to just say no and instead engage the majority constructively to find common ground. But if that is not feasible, it is perfectly reasonable for Democrats to use the process for health-care reform that both parties have used regularly for other major initiatives.”

The reconciliation process, which allows for expedited consideration of legislation affecting taxes or mandatory spending programs, was authorized by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

There’s precedent

A research brief by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, notes: “Each year, Congress adopts a budget resolution, which outlines its priorities for federal spending and taxes for the next five or more fiscal years. Reconciliation is an optional procedure that the Congress may use to help achieve its budgetary priorities.”

According to the Congressional Research Service, 22 reconciliation bills were passed between 1980 and 2008, including three vetoed by President Bill Clinton.

In 1996, a Republican-dominated Congress used the reconciliation process to pass sweeping welfare reform that punched holes in the safety net. In 2001, another Republican Congress used the process to enact the largest federal tax cuts in more than two decades.

Many of the GOP leaders who supported budget reconciliation in the past now cry foul. Sen. Judd Gregg, R.-N.H., for example, said that if Democrats resorted to budget reconciliation, “you’re talking about the exact opposite of bipartisan.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told the Salt Lake Tribune that such a move by Democrats would be “one of the worst grabs for power in the history of the country.”

Hatch and Gregg failed to note their support for budget reconciliation when Republicans were in power, voting for the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and at least a half-dozen other bills that passed as part of the reconciliation process.

A different view

Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., takes a more measured stand.

“You can drive things through a 50-vote threshold instead of that 60-vote threshold,” he said on former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett’s radio program. “It’s legal, it’s ethical, you can do it.”

Democrats can do it, but so far, they haven’t shown the inclination to flex their muscles.

Administration officials contend that budget reconciliation is still an option, though Obama has shown an aversion to playing hardball politics.

Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean has urged his party to be more assertive. Speaking about health-care reform at the America’s Future Now conference, he said: “If Republicans want to shill for insurance companies, then we should do it with 51 votes.”

X George E. Curry is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.