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Reconciliation in effect protects bills from filibusters and thus from the requirement for a 60-vote supermajority to end debate, and instead allows legislation with a budgetary impact to pass by a simple majority after limited debate. Minority parties — right now, the Republicans — tend to hate it.
But even as they fulminate about the unfairness, Republicans carry a long record of having employed reconciliation themselves on big and controversial legislative packages.
Sixteen of the 22 “reconciliation bills” that have made it through Congress were passed in the Senate when Republicans had majorities. Among them were the signature tax cuts of President George W. Bush, the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage insurance policies and the Cobra program allowing people who leave a job to pay to keep the health coverage their employer provided (the “R” and “A” in Cobra stand for “reconciliation act”).
“Is there something wrong with ‘majority rules’?” Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, once said of the reconciliation process when his party controlled the Senate. “I don’t think so.”
His objective then, in 2005, was an unsuccessful bill to allow drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge. Later that year, justifying reconciliation to pass a bill to reduce Medicaid spending, Mr. Gregg lamented, “You can’t get 60 votes because the party on the other side of the aisle simply refuses to do anything constructive in this area.”
That could be a Democrat’s quote today, but now Mr. Gregg is among the most vocal opponents of using reconciliation for the health care bill.
“The purpose of the Senate on something this complex and this comprehensive is to be a place where you have debate and you have amendments,” he said in an interview. “And if you have a decent bill you shouldn’t fear them.” ...
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