Ramming Through Health Care with Reconciliation
- Mar 3, 2010 - 1 -
Ahead of last week’s White House health care summit, President Obama billed the one-day gathering as an opportunity for leaders on all sides of the health care debate to come to the table to seek a unified path forward on reform that’s been on life support for weeks. By most accounts, the stated objective failed. When the more than seven-hour-long back-and-forth exchange between the president and congressional leaders concluded, divisions remained, perhaps even more pronounced.
Yet the president and liberal congressional leadership now appear poised to resuscitate reform by ramming it through Congress with a new tactic: reconciliation. This would allow the Senate to pass a multi-trillion-dollar health care overhaul with just 51 votes rather than 60 as required for most substantive legislation. Under the procedure, the House could first approve the Senate-passed bill. Then the House could pass another bill to “fix” some areas of disagreement, and send it on to the Senate, where it would need just a simple majority.
This go-it-alone strategy is cause for alarm. The reconciliation option, put in place in 1974, was designed to speed passage of budgetary measures in the Senate. But restructuring nearly one-sixth of the U.S. economy and radically altering social policy were not originally intended usages of the arcane Senate procedure.
Even so, liberals are downplaying the strategy. When one concerned senator broached the reconciliation issue during the summit, President Obama seemed to suggest method is not important, responding, “I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate.” And Rep. George Miller (D-CA), a key health care figure, later commented that “the process by which it’s done won’t be long remembered,” according to the Capitol Hill Roll Call newspaper. Polling suggests otherwise. A majority of Americans oppose the reconciliation method to pass health care reform, according to a recent Gallup poll, and greater numbers want to scrap reform and start over.
Entertaining the idea of reconciliation is a departure from rhetoric in previous months. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), one of the authors of the procedure known also as the “Byrd rule,” wrote less than a year ago in the Washington Post that passing health care reform through reconciliation is “an outrage that must be resisted.” All told, at least 18 senators who voted for the Senate bill in December have expressed opposition to using reconciliation for health care reform.
The White House summit proceedings and renewed efforts to push through health care reform under reconciliation also underscore lack of progress on resolving the abortion issue. Since only budgetary legislation can pass by reconciliation, restrictions on abortion funding under health care would not be included.
At the summit, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) rightly expressed concerns that the president’s recently unveiled health care proposal, which doubles down on the Senate-passed bill, still includes abortion funding. This statement of fact was quietly dismissed by the president and denied as untrue by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Earlier in the week, the House minority leader sent a letter to the president requesting that Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), the champion for removing funding of elective abortion within the House reform bill, be given a seat at the summit table. That request was denied.
Though shortchanged in discussion by liberal drivers of a health care overhaul, the contentious abortion issue could spell reform’s demise. Last November, the House passed its bill 220-215—a narrow three-vote margin—with inclusion of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment barring funding for elective abortion that passed 240-194. But a House vote now on a bill that authorizes abortion funding, such as the Senate bill or the president’s proposal, could tip the balance the other direction.
Proponents of reform seem undeterred from giving the American people a dose of bad medicine. While the reconciliation tool could potentially placate enough elected officials to send a bill to the president’s desk for signature, the steps toward that end would also shut out opponents from the public policy process and create a new set of problems in health care—more governmental control, more taxes, higher premiums, and funding of abortion, to name a few. This is a deadly prescription.
If you agree, please contact your representative and senators and tell them to oppose use of reconciliation to pass health care reform.
To view the ERLC’s assessment of President Obama’s health care proposal, click here. To view the ERLC’s Fifteen Principles for Successful Health Care Reform, click here.
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1 On Mar 3rd, 2010, at 3:55pm, Charles Enlow wrote:
The 60-votes for cutting off debate in the Senate was a Democrat tactic for stalling legislation when Republicans were in the majority. Now that Democrats are, and can’t muster 60 votes, they want to scrap the 60-vote rule and go with a simple majority. Bottom line here is Democrats make the rules to guarantee a win for themselves, but when the rules become “inconvenient”, they change them. Does this strike anybody else as being dishonest? Unethical, even, or un-American?