Seven arguments Republicans should not be making against using reconciliation for health-care reform
1. Legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate.Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart and right-wing media grossly distort Reid's jobs comments. How? Beck, Fox and Breitbart must be reading up on their lessons on how to be good little anti-American fascist propagandists. Just like they did with ACORN, the right-wing media has edited the video tape.
On Fox News earlier this week, anchor Megyn Kelly provided viewers with a novel interpretation of reconciliation. "It means," she said, "that the bill will be pushed through the senate with 50 votes instead of the usual 60." Unfortunately, the Constitution implies that a simple majority (51 votes) is all it takes for legislation to pass the Senate. The number 60 refers to the supermajority required to break a filibuster, i.e., the extraconstitutional procedure that allows a single senator to delay whatever legislation he or she chooses. It's true that there have been more GOP filibusters (154) since Obama took office than there were between 1963 and 1983, and that this tactic has effectively created a situation where 60 votes are required to pass routine proposals as well as major programs. But that doesn't mean 60 votes are "usually" necessary. The current gridlock is a historical anomaly—the exception rather than the rule.
2. Democrats are threatening to use reconciliation to pass health-care reform.
In a Feb. 23 USA Today op-ed, Hatch wrote that the dastardly Dems were planning to use "special rules to circumvent bipartisan Senate opposition" and "jam this bill through Congress." But that's not true, and Hatch knows it. Why? Because he was actually in the Senate on Dec. 24 when Obama's bill passed. Here’s the CNN story to prove it. See? Sixty yea votes, 39 nay—which is nine votes more than the Dems needed, at least according to the U.S. Constitution. (A few weeks earlier, the House passed its own version of the bill, 220–215.) Furthermore, the opposition in the Senate was hardly bipartisan: every one of the 39 senators who voted against the bill was a Republican, and every one of the 60 senators who voted for it was a Democrat.
So Obama doesn't need to resort to reconciliation to pass health-care reform. He's already passed it. What he does need it for, however, is passing the revisions necessary to get the House and the Senate to agree on a single version of the legislation. This means that after the House passes the Senate version of the bill, the Senate will approve what's known as a "sidecar"—a small package of budget-related tweaks designed to make the House happy. These revisions represent the only part of health-care reform that Senate Democrats are seeking to pass through reconciliation, i.e., with a simple majority rather than a supermajority. This is less ambitious than the usual reconciliation process, which typically applies to entire bills, not more.
