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Here’s how [Pelosi’s “deem and pass” strategy] will work: Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House “deems” the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes.
The virtue of this, for Pelosi’s members, is that they don’t actually vote on the Senate bill. They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed, even if the Senate hasn’t voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never specifically voted on the Senate bill.
”So this is how they’re getting around the trust issue that arose when the plan was for the House to pass the Senate version then fix the bill in reconciliation.
(via thepoliticalpartygirl)
“It means that the bill will be pushed through the senate with 50 votes instead of the usual 60.”
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[(R) Sen. Orrin] Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for “substantive legislation” unless the legislation has “significant bipartisan support.” But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were “substantive legislation.” The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about “ramming through.”
The underlying “principle” here seems to be that it’s fine to pass tax cuts for the wealthy on narrow votes but an outrage to use reconciliation to help middle-income and poor people get health insurance.
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A Brief History Of Senate Reconciliation
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“That is a total, utter, complete, 100%, unambiguous lie,” “I find it hard to believe they think they can get away with stuff like this.” Republicans used reconciliation a lot,” “For major legislation. They did it all the time. And they’re now lying about that record. … Orrin Hatch is lying about that in the Washington Post, and the Washington Post is just printing the lying!”
“For us all to just let this slide and call it politics is to surrender to cynicism,”… “The country needs real debate. The country needs real opposition. The country needs you guys to grow up here.”
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Crimson Hexagon tracks online comments. Here are some results regarding Reconciliation.
via CNN
2005 (R) Sen. Judd Gregg schools Democrats on how and why reconciliation is entirely appropriate.
“If you’ve got 51 votes for your position, you win!”
MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell did a refreshingly good fact check of the ‘it’s never been done before’ nonsense coming from Republicans on reconciliation.
Reconciliation
Lamar Alexander said that reconciliation has never been used for anything as big as health-care reform. Health-care reform has a 10-year cost of about $950 billion. The Bush tax cuts, which passed through reconciliation, had a 10-year cost of about $1.8 trillion. Lamar Alexander voted for them. - Ezra Klein
The first thing out of the Republicans’ side is Lamar Alexander and the rarity of reconciliation—how we just don’t use that for healthcare. Sen. Alexander, you know what the “R” in COBRA stands for, right? You know that SCHIP passed through reconciliation in 1997, right? - DailyKos
“The sanctimony one hears about reconciliation is a little bit much. Reconciliation has been used twenty two times. I worked here in the Senate when Ronald Reagan was President in August of 1981. He used reconciliation as did the Republicans to embrace and to enact his entire economic budget and tax program. So, this isn’t new. It’s provided by statute and the Republicans hands are not clean on this subject.”
