On Sat, 13 Mar 2010, Glenn Greenwald was quoted:
> In response, advocates of the public option kept
> arguing<http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/20/the-insidious-myth-of-the-progressive-%E2%80%9Cbill-killers%E2%80%9D/>that
> the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only
> 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that
> reconciliation
> proposal<http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/insidious-myth-of-reconciliation.html>,
> insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that
> using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and
> politically disastrous."
And the Obama loyalists were correct -- on this one technical point. But Greenwald can be forgiven -- I'd say 99% of all people don't understand the current reconciliation maneuver. Which is kind of a damning judgment on Senate rules and current American politics.
In simple terms:
1) You can't use reconciliation except to increase or decrease spending on programs that already exist.
2) So then: how come we can use it to modify Obamacare?
3) Simple ;-) : because we won't use it until after it already exists.
A version of Obamacare has already been passed by 60 votes in the Senate -- that's the key. Without that, reconciliation would have nothing to work on.
The plan is for the House to pass the exact same thing that the Senate did -- which they don't want to do -- and then treat the resulting law, which passed both houses, as an "existing program" for the purposes of reconciliation.
Supposedly this is legal, to treat it as an existing program because it's been passed by both houses of Congress even though it hasn't been signed by the President. Supposedly this is sufficent to pass muster under the Byrd Rule.
And even under this, the House chafes that they don't trust the Senate -- that if they pass the Senate bill, the Senate Dems could end up not doing everything in reconciliation that they promised. There is no legal way to bind them.
And this is what leads to the very narrow pass they are in where every vote counts and the House might not even pass the Senate bill before them. The House only passed their version by 220 votes -- where 218 is a majority. If 3 people change sides, the House couldn't even repass their own bill, never mind the Senate's. And Stupak famously says he's got 12 to jump.
But anyway, the original point, that you couldn't pass the current healthcare bill through reconciliation in the first place, is still valid. Forget not being able to create the public option. According to Kent Conrad (who is kind of the current Byrd, the stickler for the rules), you couldn't even put in any of the rules regulating the industry. Most of the heart of even this feeble bill would have been stricken under the Byrd Rule. But once it already exists, then you can use Reconciliation to tinker with it.
Here's a pretty good piece explaining it all by Jonathan Chait:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/jesus-christ-mike-allen-reconciliation-not-complicated
He thinks he's insulting Mike Allen in his title, but actually it's an insult to the rules. If Mike Allen can't understand them, who can? To say this is "not complicated" is a sick joke.
BTW, on Greenwald's larger point, that the public option campaign was something of a scam -- that the Obama Dem leaders were always exaggerating their support for the public option, and were always perfectly willing to sacrifice it as a bargaining chip, thus in effect lying to and just waiting to betray their base -- I agree with that. (Yes, SA, you won that bet.) It's just on this technical point about reconciliation I disagree. And I wish it were true. It would mean it would be easy to make the Senate into a democratic institution. Unfortunately, it's not.
Michael