Reconciliation

Healthcare legislation has passed. The effectiveness of the bill is yet to be determined. There has been a lot of talk over the past year about whether this is a bill can increase access and decrease costs, whether there was enough bipartisanship and whether the process was appropriate. In fact, I even addressed the lack of bipartisan collaboration in my first post.

Long ago Chris and I had a conversation about the importance of bringing people together and discussing solutions and calling out inaccurate or misleading rhetoric. And so here is a discussion on the latter.

Republicans act like someone insulted their mother when they talk about how the Democrats used reconciliation to pass healthcare. Reconciliation allows legislation to proceed without the possibility of a filibuster. In other words, bills can pass the Senate with a simple majority vote, just like the House, as opposed to a supermajority of 60 votes. This was originally used as a way to reconcile budget differences between the House and Senate, so they could send one bill to the president. Instead of compromising on the whole bill (in this case more than 2,000 pages), they could proceed with the common language and then just “reconcile” the differences in a separate bill. It is actually a very useful tool in saving countless hours in the legislative process. Sounds okay, right?

Well, Republicans are arguing that the majority is trampling the rights of the minority and voters will condemn this unacceptable action at the polls. Are they serious? They claim to be upset that the Democrats used a procedural move to get healthcare passed. Yet, what do they call a filibuster to stop a bill? Are voters really supposed to overlook one procedural tactic and not the other? Actually, do voters really care how a bill was passed?

I am not accusing the Republicans of having a monopoly on hypocrisy, because they certainly don’t. But when you want to complain that the rights of the minority are being egregiously stomped on, let’s think about whether you would have done the same to get one of your priorities passed. Of course the answer is yes, you would have. In fact, during my lifetime this is the 22nd time reconciliation has been used, and 16 of those times it was a Republican president signing the bill.