RULES OF THE GAME Reconciliation Looms Large As Debate Continues Democrats Could Find The Procedure Costs More Than It's Worth Monday, Oct. 5, 2009 by This content is protected A loaded question looms over Senate health care negotiations as they enter the crucial phase between now and mid-October: What if Democrats don't win the 60 votes they need to break a GOP filibuster? The obvious answer is that they'd resort to the obscure procedural tool known as reconciliation, which would require only a 51-vote majority. For months, Democrats have talked about using reconciliation, a process designed to facilitate fast-track approval of budget bills, if they can't reach the magical number 60. But as Democrats' informal mid-October deadline for action draws near, the complexities of reconciliation are looking increasingly nasty. Restrictive reconciliation rules would require non-germane measures, such as those with no budget implications, to be considered separately. At least one Democrat -- Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. -- has said he would oppose using reconciliation to enact health care changes. And the predictable GOP backlash could undermine public support and further aggravate partisan tensions on Capitol Hill. Among other constraints, reconciliation restricts floor debate to no more than 20 hours. "To use budget reconciliation in this way would be to employ a legislative loophole to rewrite one-sixth of our economy with 20 hours of debate," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said at a late-September press conference. "If that option is chosen, I think there will be a severely negative and, frankly, appropriate reaction on the part of the American people that this process is jamming through something about which, in the end, we'll only have bipartisan opposition." To be sure, partisan bickering is so vicious already that Democrats may conclude they've got nothing to lose. Resorting to reconciliation would amount to "bridge burning, not bridge building," acknowledged William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a policy adviser to President Clinton. "On the other hand, as I look at Congress right now, I don't see a lot of bridges that haven't been bombed out already. It's sort of like Europe in 1944." Still, reconciliation would pose so many practical problems -- for a bill that is plenty complex already -- that even staunch backers of health care reform are wary. Because of germaneness rules that would allow votes only on measures that change budget outlays or revenues, key insurance market reforms, for example, would have to be stripped out and considered under regular order. "It does make the legislative product incomplete," said Ron Pollack, executive director of the progressive nonprofit Families USA. "And it requires passing what's missing [from a reconciliation bill], and doing so with 60 votes." Reconciliation rules also require budget outlays to be offset yearly for the first five years, Pollack noted, complicating efforts to subsidize mandated health coverage for middle-income families. "That could cause some problems and might require some scaling back of the subsidies that are required to make health care affordable," he said. "That would be very regrettable and would make health reform much less enticing to many families across the country." Reconciliation "is not a panacea," agreed Jim Manley, spokesman to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "It's not the silver bullet. And we could not do everything we wanted to do." Reid's only focus right now is "trying to get the 60 votes necessary in order to get a bipartisan bill out of the Senate," said Manley. At this stage, he added, "there is a very good chance that we're going to be able to pull this off." Even so, Manley said Reid's public statements signaling that reconciliation is an option still stand: "If we have to go down the road of reconciliation, he's certainly prepared to do so." It wouldn't be the first time the majority party fell back on reconciliation as a way to force action. The reconciliation process has been used successfully at least 19 times since 1980, according to the Congressional Research Service. Presidents Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush all used reconciliation as a means to enact important parts of their agendas, noted Galston. Democrats "would be taking a leap into the procedural void, there's no question about it," he said. "But when you're in politics, the question is always: Compared to what? I mean, compared to having the whole thing go down in the Senate, after the amount of political capital that Democrats have invested in this?" With virtually all Senate Republicans opposed and some moderate Democrats still skeptical, health reform advocates may find themselves forced to fall back on Plan B. That leaves reconciliation, warts and all, still squarely on the table. And it thrusts the emotional health care debate to the brink of an even more complex, controversial phase. "If they're faced with a choice between reconciliation or defeat, I think they'll choose reconciliation," Galston said of the Democrats. But, he added, they make the choice "without any guarantee that reconciliation will lead to victory."
