Odds on Reconciliation
So President Obama and the Democrats are going to use the reconciliation route to pass health care ‘reform’ (sic)?
Are there any odds in Las Vegas on this yet?
If so, you might want to place some money down on it…it would be a humdinger of a Super Bowl contest of wills, patience and parliamentary maneuvering unlike any we may have ever seen before.
Here is something we just don’t quite fully comprehend: The Democrats have already ‘won’ the silver medal. The House can pass the Senate version of the health care bill today and have it signed into law by the President in no time flat. That is ‘two/thirds-bad’ or ‘three quarters-good’, depending on where you sit. They could go home today knowing they have already passed most of what they wanted to get in the first place.
Perhaps they sense that this might be their one and only chance to pass such a major expansion of federal control over the health care system in their lifetimes so they are willing to risk it all to get the ‘gold-plated’ platinum medal in terms of health care reform bills, at least in their eyes.
If that is the case, let’s close our eyes and try to imagine what this ‘budget reconciliation’ (BR) process really looks, acts and feels like. Imagine you are the BR Bill itself. You have been conceived and birthed by 60 US Democrat Senators, 255 House Democrats and a President in the White House and nurtured and fostered by a dizzying array of labor unions and other nannies along the way.
So your collective DNA has a lot of complexities to begin with.
You are mad and frustrated that Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders set up the procedures of the US Senate so that the rights of the minority party can not ever be completely trampled underfoot no matter what the other party has won in the last election. In fact, it used to be that only 1 single Senator could hold up the proceedings of the Senate as long as he would stay on his feet and ‘filibuster’ a bill ’til Kingdom Come. (see Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’)
That is the concept of ‘unanimous consent’ which fosters and breeds compromise and collegial negotiation and comes from the days of the Roman Republic itself. ‘SPQR’ or ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’ meaning “The Senate and the People of Rome” which shows you how much the Senate back then thought of their special relationship with the public.
In fact, we submit that going back to the full filibuster rules might actually yield more compromise, not less, than under current 60-vote cloture rules but that is a thought-bomb for another place and another time.
Anyway, you now look at the gauntlet of Senate rules and parliamentary procedures between you and your utopian Olympian dream: being passed into law as President Obama’s signature piece of legislation. It could go down in history as one of the greatest works of legislation in the history of the American Republic or be infamous as the undoing of the first African-American President the United States has ever had.
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