The Conservative Front

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich gives an excellent explanation of the Reconciliation process being tossed about in the Legislature as a way of circumventing a Republican filibuster and passing ObamaCare with a simple majority.

Harry Reid flat-out lied when he said “nobody is talking about reconciliation” as a way to pass the health care reform bill. Here he is only days before the health care summit.

Speaker Gingrich writes,

The budget reconciliation process was created in 1974 as part of the law that created much of the modern rules and organizational structures used by Congress to pass the annual budget.

This new law required Congress to pass a budget resolution every year that would set the parameters by which the various congressional committees would write their specific parts of the total budget bill.

Within these budget resolutions, instructions can be given to specific congressional committees to create legislation that would alter current laws affecting spending and/or taxation in order to conform to the targets set out in the budget resolution.

To enhance Congress’ ability to meet budget resolution targets, these pieces of legislation are not passed under the normal rules of the Senate. Instead, they fall under the “budget reconciliation process” rules which prohibit unrelated amendments to the bills and set a maximum of 20 hours of debate on the floor. As a practical matter, this means only 51 votes are needed to pass a reconciliation bill because the limit on debate overrides the threat of a filibuster.

The Byrd Rule to Prevent Abuse of Reconciliation

While the budget reconciliation process was a success in its principal goal of giving Congress more power to meet the spending and revenue goals of the budget resolution, it quickly became prone to abuse.

Provisions that had nothing to do with meeting budget resolution requirements, even some that directly contradicted them, were passed using the reconciliation process.

To prevent this, the so-called “Byrd Rule,” named after Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, who introduced the legislation, was passed in 1985 and made permanent in 1990.

The Byrd Rule allows any senator to raise a point of order objection to provisions in a reconciliation bill that they consider extraneous to meeting budget resolutions requirements. Then, it is up to the chair – either the Vice President (as President of the Senate) or, more often, the presiding officer of the Senate if the Vice President is not present — whether that provision stays or is stricken.

However, the chair almost always relies on the advice of the Senate Parliamentarian to determine if that objection is legitimate. (Learn more about the parliamentarian here.)

This determination is made based on six tests created as part of the Byrd Rule used to weed out provisions that have nothing to do with raising or reducing taxes or spending. It takes a 3/5 majority vote to override the decision of the presiding officer if he or she finds that a provision violates one or more of these tests. (This Congressional Research Service report is a good primer on the Byrd rule if you want to learn more.)

Reconciliation in Action

Reconciliation has been used for 22 bills, of which, 14 were passed by Republican majorities. Nineteen of those bills were signed into law by the President. Three were vetoed. You can view a chart of these bills here.

Notice the similarity between them? All of these bills were obviously directly related to taxation and spending, and since 1985, have successfully met the Byrd rule tests.

Health Reform Is About More than Federal Spending

This is why passing the left’s big government, big bureaucracy health bill using the budget reconciliation process is so fundamentally dishonest and dangerous to Senate precedent.

Leaving aside the bill’s merits (which, to be clear, are abysmal), both its defenders and detractors would acknowledge that it is, for better or worse, a fundamental overhaul of the nation’s health system, both public and private. It sets new rules and regulations that span the entire healthcare sector. It is much larger in scope and more all encompassing in purpose than simply affecting federal spending and revenues.

This is not to say that the bill would not have some effect on the federal budget. Almost any piece of legislation could meet that meager standard.

The reconciliation process was only intended to be used for legislation directly related to meeting budget resolution spending and revenue goals.

The minor affect the left’s health bill would have on the deficit over 10 years (beyond that there is every reason to think it would increase the deficit substantially), even by charitable estimates, cannot be used to justify passing this sort of sweeping legislation using reconciliation.

This is one reason why a number of Democrats, including Sen. Robert Byrd, author of the Byrd Rule and who also helped create the budget reconciliation process in 1974, called the idea of using it to pass the health bill (and cap and trade) “an outrage that must be resisted.”

It’s also why Robert Byrd objected to President Clinton’s efforts to pass Hillarycare in 1993 using reconciliation.

Why should the left’s latest big government healthcare grab be held to any different standard?

Liberals and Progressive Democrats are already shouting that Republicans used reconciliation to pass welfare reform. Newt’s response:

Since welfare reform was passed while I was Speaker of the House, I am happy to compare the two cases.

First, welfare reform was an integral part of the Republican Congress’ efforts to balance the budget, producing immediate savings of over $50 billion dollars between 1997 and 2002. It was originally combined with the balanced budget act that President Clinton vetoed in 1995.

By contrast, for most of the debate over the health bill, the left has constantly boasted about how their bill was “deficit neutral”. President Obama repeatedly sought to assure the American people that he would not sign a bill that “added one dime” to the deficit. Medicare cuts were combined with new taxes to pay for the cost of new programs and bureaucracies.

So while real effective health reform would certainly have a positive effect on the deficit, it is clear that the left never intended for their health bill to be primarily a budget bill. Its focus was and still is on getting more people covered. It was only after Democratic leaders began setting the stage for passing the bill using reconciliation that they began emphasizing it as a way to reduce the deficit. (Paul Ryan explains here how their bill uses smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of savings).

Second, when we decided to roll welfare reform into the balanced budget bill in 1995, we never stopped the conference committee efforts to resolve the differences between the versions of the welfare reform legislation that passed in the House and Senate earlier in the year. This continuation of work, along with the active participation of the governors, allowed us to quickly produce the final bill in conference the next year, once it became clear that President Clinton was now finally ready to sign welfare reform.

In contrast, the Democrats have done an end run around the conference committee process that would resolve the differences between the House and Senate bills, instead trying to negotiate their final bill in secret at the White House. This process continues today, with President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid exploring different tricks they can use to ram a bill through their respective chambers without first producing a conference bill.

Third, welfare reform was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, with more Democrats voting for it in the House and Senate than opposing it. It was signed by a Democratic President. Bipartisanship was integral to the success of the bill.

Today, Democrats are turning to passing the bill using the reconciliation process precisely because they are rejecting bipartisanship. Republican Scott Brown’s stunning election in Massachusetts, thanks largely to opposition to the left’s health bill, has meant that the Democrats would need at least one Republican vote to break a filibuster in the Senate. And their bill is so bad they can’t get one.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, welfare reform was overwhelmingly popular with the American people. One poll showed that over 90 percent of Americans favored reform, including 88 percent of those on welfare.

As for the left’s health bill, after a year of debate and discussion, the American people have overwhelmingly rejected it. A poll we released at the Center for Health Transformation showed that it is opposed by a 2-1 margin. It is a fact that the more Americans learn about the left’s plan, both its substance and the corrupt manner in which it has been passed, the more they oppose it.

Keep in mind that as recently as 2005, even Barack Obama was complaining that the Republican threat to use the “nuclear option” to shut down Democratic filibusters holding up judicial appointments would have created a majoritarian government not intended by the founders. But now that the shoe’s on the other foot, Majoritarianism seems to be the preferred order of the day. Back then, Republicans called Democrats “obstructionists” for filibustering the appointments of Pres. Bush’s judicial nominees, which Bush had every right to make. Now Democrats call Republicans “obstructionists” because they object to the idea of “fundamentally transforming” the American health care system. Which is worse, seating a Republican President’s judicial nominations, or usurping control of a nation’s health care system in a massive power grab that has nothing to do with health care? I think we can all see which obstruction is justifiable.