By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 2/28/10 6:27 PM EST
- Robert Byrd was an original author of the 1974 reconciliation rules, which Republicans such as Jon Kyl have been forced to defend using. Photo: AP photo composite by POLITICO
Democrats took heat over the “Louisiana Purchase,” and ultimately disavowed the “Cornhusker Kickback.”
Now, they are racing to keep Republicans from defining the only legislative tool left to salvage the health care reform bill as yet another tactic hatched in a Democratic back room.
During a year in which “deal” is a dirty word, Democratic congressional leaders are already waging a battle to defend reconciliation and beat back Republican charges that the fast-track rules are an abuse of power.
Democrats, including President Barack Obama, like to say Americans care more about the shape of a final bill than the way it was passed. But the Senate health care bill has suffered, in part, because of a voter backlash over the tactics Democrats employed to secure 60 votes in the Senate.
Republicans are craving a repeat.
“I’ll tell you one thing, if Speaker Pelosi rams this bill through the House using a reconciliation process, they will lose their majority in Congress in November,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The battle lines crystallized over the past week. From Thursday’s White House health care summit to the Sunday talk shows, Republicans have blasted reconciliation as everything from “cataclysmic” to a “trick” to push the bill through Congress.
Democrats, in turn, argued Republicans have no grounds to criticize, accusing them of rank hypocrisy given their frequent embrace of the tactic during the past 30 years, when they passed several major bills using the threshold of a 51-vote Senate majority, not the usual 60.
In a rhetorical shift, Democrats have begun avoiding the word “reconciliation,” in favor of “simple majority.”
“Health care reform has already passed both the House and the Senate with not only a majority in the Senate but a supermajority,” White House health care czar Nancy-Ann DeParle said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And we’re not talking about changing any rules here. All the president’s talking about is: Do we need to address this problem, and does it make sense to have a simple, up-or-down vote on whether or not we want to fix these problems.”
Since 1980, Republican presidents have signed 14 of the 19 reconciliation bills into law, including two tax cuts in the George W. Bush administration that did not reduce the deficit, which the reconciliation rules explicitly require. And it was a Republican Congress that used reconciliation in 1996 to pass a sweeping overhaul of the welfare reform system, proposed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.
“The criticism of us is absolutely duplicitous,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a leading proponent of health reform. “It is chutzpah. How can those who have championed the use of reconciliation, and far more frequently, how can they come and criticize us?”
There is truth in the Democratic and Republican arguments, said Marty Gold, an expert on Senate procedure who served three members, including former Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).
“To a degree both sides are correct,” Gold said.
Republicans have used the tool frequently and for far more than just minor fiscal adjustments. But Gold believes the reason Democrats will deploy the strategy is blatantly political — in “express defiance of an election outcome” — and would set a negative precedent in the Senate.
If Democrats succeed, reconciliation will be used more often as a default mechanism to pass legislation, making the Senate more of a majority-rules body than it has traditionally been, Gold said.
“This will come around again,” Gold said. “If it’s used in this case and gotten away with, the process will be revisited, and that will cause immense consternation on the other side when it is used in reverse.”
Reconciliation has never drawn quite as much scrutiny. In the 2001 tax cut debate, Democrats, including Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), objected to reconciliation as an “abuse of the process” that was “trampling on the minority’s rights.” But the tactic never appeared to generate as much buzz as it has with health care reform.
Republicans were forced on Sunday to defend their use of reconciliation. Cantor and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said Republicans never resorted to it to overhaul a major portion of the economy. But Kyl also acknowledged that he was “not sure that it should have been used for welfare reform,” even though the bill ultimately received 74 Senate votes.
“Here it is only being used because they cannot get the 60 votes that would ordinarily be required,” Kyl said on “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s why Robert Byrd said to use it in this situation would be outrage. As he said in his letter, if you can’t do it the usual way, then you shouldn’t do it by reconciliation just because you can’t get the votes otherwise.”
(It should be noted, however, that the Bush tax cuts never attracted 60 Senate votes. The 2001 bill passed with 58 votes. Onthe second round. in 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney was needed to break a 50-50 tie.)
Republicans repeatedly invoked the Senate’s longest-serving senator, Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who is a fierce guardian of Senate procedure, to prove their point.
Byrd was an original author of the 1974 reconciliation rules, which allowed Congress to make tough tax and spending decisions through a simple majority. But once the Senate began using the rule to get around the chamber’s supermajority rules and make extraneous policy changes, Byrd reined in the excesses with the “Byrd rule,” which required every element of a reconciliation bill to have a direct impact on the federal budget.
In March 2009, Byrd wrote in The Washington Post that passing health care reform through reconciliation is “an outrage that must be resisted.” Both Kyl and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) quoted Byrd on Sunday.
“The misuse of the arcane process of reconciliation — a process intended for deficit reduction — to enact substantive policy changes is an undemocratic disservice to our people and to the Senate’s institutional role,” Byrd wrote.
A Byrd spokesman did not return a request for comment Sunday on the senator’s latest view of the Democratic plan to use reconciliation.
But Democrats are not doing exactly what Byrd decried. Democrats already passed the comprehensive reform bill through the House and the Senate. They are now looking to make fixes to the bill by packaging changes in a reconciliation measure — a distinction that becomes lost in the debate.
Congressional leaders. however, are looking to incorporate as many elements as possible from Obama’s 11-page health care proposal into the reconciliation bill, making it much larger than moderate Democrats have said they would feel comfortable supporting.
Democrats acknowledge their strategy is risky in such a toxic political environment, .
John Lawrence, chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told health care activists in a conference call Friday that Congress needed to act before the Easter recess, or they could see a repeat of the tumultuous August break. Only this time, Republicans will use reconciliation to characterize the party as “shoving it down our throats,” Lawrence said, according to notes provided by a person on the call.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus predicted Democrats would be successful, but he also called the process “fraught with complications.”
“We have never been in this situation before,” Baucus said Friday.
And Conrad continued his role as the No. 1 Democratic skeptic of the procedure, saying it can be used to pass only very limited changes.
“I am the chairman of the committee in the Senate, and I think I understand how reconciliation works and can’t work,” Conrad said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” arguing that the so-called Byrd Rule would prevent the use of reconciliation for the main health care bill. “The only possible role I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package.”
