Sneaking Obamacare through the Reconciliation Process

I am not a big fan of Newt Gingrich, but he makes a lot of sense in Turning the Senate into the Chicago City Council, published yesterday in Human Events.com. Go read the whole thing.

The issue is using the Senate's "reconciliation" rule, to pass a version of Obamacare instead of going the normal route requiring 60 votes, which may need some explaining. As it stands, a threatened filibuster will require 60 votes to overcome, which process is known as "cloture." So, instead, Sen. Reid plans to invoke the reconciliation rule, wherein he only needs 51 votes to pass the bill. The problem is that reconciliation was only intended to be used for budget bills:

“Using the budget reconciliation process to pass health reform and climate change legislation…would violate the intent and spirit of the budget process, and do serious injury to the constitutional role of the Senate.”

These are not the words of a Republican or a conservative activist.

This is a warning issued on April 2 of this year from the former Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate, Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.).

Of course, the Democrats have changed the rules in the middle of the game before, when they started filibustering conservative nominees to the federal courts. The filibuster had never been used that way before. Unfortunately, if Senator Reid does this, he is likely to sooner or later regret it. The party in control of the Congress has changed before, and when it does, Republicans may take the same tactic. But this was not the intent:

In a famous conversation between the two presidents, Thomas Jefferson is said to have asked George Washington why the Framers had agreed to a second chamber in Congress at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. "Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?" Washington asked him. "To cool it," said Jefferson. "Even so," said Washington, "we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it."