Rockefeller says he’s for it if it’s the only way:
“If it is a choice between getting a good health care bill and doing it in reconciliation, I will take that in a shot,” Rockefeller said. “What I don’t like is no result. And if it takes more time to get a result — even if has to be done through reconciliation as a last resort — don’t think I am going to lose sleep over that.”
TAPPED and Steve Benen have more on the details of the process by which bills can be passed by a majority rather than requiring 50 60 votes.
Even if it reconciliation isn’t ultimately used here, it’s a good bargaining chip at the very least.
superluminar
bills can be passed by a majority rather than requiring 50 votes.
Think you mean 60 votes, right?
I think that reconciliation should be the first option, not the last, given the dumbasses who are holding up the vote.
General Winfield Stuck
I would be totally shocked if a bill with a good PO were passed with regular order, or 60 votes to defeat a certain filibuster. Ben Nelson, with Omaha mecca for insurance and some others in the NE the same like Carper from DE, will not ever vote for a PO, I don’t think. As well as 3 or 4 other redsate dems. I would surely hope I’m wrong about this, and we shall see.
And Rockefeller seems to be one eager beaver pushing a PO which is good to see/ He probably is relieved to get back on the good side of progressives after his disasterous shilling for the FISA amnesty and bill, and other Intel committee clusterfucks he oversaw.
Bill
“TAPPED and Steve Benen have more on the details of the process by which bills can be passed by a majority rather than requiring 50 votes.”
John,
Don’t you mean:
“rather than requiring 60 votes”?
Bill
DougJ
bill and superluminar:
Thanks. I corrected the post.
PeakVT
Nuclear option. A good reform bill would be worth it.
August J. Pollak
Or we could have Democrats with a sack who actually understand what the position of “majority whip” fucking means.
Litlebritdifrnt
I want someone, gawd just anyone, to put out an ad which will tell the small business owners out there HOW MUCH DAMN MONEY THIS WILL SAVE THEM! My boss pays $1,600.00 a month just for me and him! That is close to 20k per year just for the two of us. That would be 20K per year he didn’t have to pay out. Why are they not pushing this aspect of the solution?
dmsilev
But if we do that, David Broder might cry!
-dms
geg6
Good to see Jello Jay found something that would stiffen him. Seems like health care got him some of that there E D medication or something.
Keith G
I want to believe that good will come of this. I know so many – most are younger coworkers – who need health care, but will the USA actually decide to join the other modern democracies?
Jen R
I’m old enough to remember when it was normal for bills to only require a majority to pass.
Fucking spineless Dems.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Bu-but, you promised to be bipartisan!
/Republicon.
jenniebee
I really don’t see why Reid doesn’t make the holdouts filibuster. By the time it gets to that point, the bill will be specific so there won’t be this vague speculating about what might or might not be in it. Chris Matthews is asking where are the people marching on DC for health care reform; get things stalled in the Senate with daily votes for cloture, and you’ve got political theater that people will tune into and show up for.
Comrade Jake
@jenniebee:
That would require some form of leadership. Reid does not have any.
Jon H
Doesn’t he mean a choice between “a bad health care bill and doing it in reconciliation”?
As he worded it, it sounds like reconciliation would be preferable to getting a good health care bill.
ninerdave
Question for the people smarter than I.
If I recall correctly, Bush pushed through his tax cuts for the wealthy via reconciliation.
However if I’m reading the articles that Benen sites right, health care reform passed through reconciliation would have to essentially be budget neutral (*). How did Bush get his tax cuts through? They were obviously not budget neutral.
I’m probably totally wrong in the analysis of the above…so enlighten me.
* as an aside, why is it the conservatives would rather borrow than pay as you go?
DougJ
However if I’m reading the articles that Benen sites right, health care reform passed through reconciliation would have to essentially be budget neutral (*). How did Bush get his tax cuts through? They were obviously not budget neutral.
I’m trying to understand that too.
PeakVT
How did Bush get his tax cuts through?
By letting the cuts expire in 2010 so the numbers worked.
Mark S.
Yeah, PeakVT is right. I found that out when I was helping my parents do their will. It was pretty stupid. Either get rid of the estate tax or don’t, but don’t get rid of it for a few years and bring it back.
Sentient Puddle
I thought Bush got them through because the Republicans didn’t give a fuck about what non-Republicans thought about process.
General Winfield Stuck
@DougJ:
Because the dems implemented Pay Go rule, like the House. That’s the only reason, as there is no other legal requirement
forcing them to.
This is the great irony, amongst the many great ironies of wingnut criticism. Their motto was “Deficits don’t matter”. Just ask Darth Cheney.
someguy
Ram it down their throats. Who gives a shit what pinhead Republican voters or their even dumber and sleazier elected types, think about anything? They damn near ruined the country. Take the keys away from them. I don’t care if you have to make the sergeant at arms lock them in the cloakroom with the blue dogs, hold the vote and then cite quorum rules to explain how the bill passed with a 38-0 vote. What are they going to do by way of reprisal – shake their plastic hair at us? Commit adultery? Molest a page or two?
ninerdave
@PeakVT:
Ok I think I sorta get it. I see the political rationale, Dems will “increase taxes”, when the tax cuts expire.
But what budget “magic” accounts for the hole in the budget between when the tax cuts were enacted and 2010?. I find it hard to believe that the GOP would cut taxes, then raise them to make them budget neutral in 2010. Unless of course there was some sort of “Laffer curve” nonsense, and even then letting the tax cuts expire would essentially prove that the cuts in the first place weren’t warranted.
No Blood for Hubris
“Something is better than nothing”?
As in, anthrax is better than a putrid peanut-butter sandwich floating down the Thames?
Martin
Well, Obama said at the get-go that Republicans had until August to compromise on a bill or he’d push for it to get done during reconciliation.
So, everything is just going according to plan.
asiangrrlMN
Good. It’s about time the Dems got some goddamn balls and actually acted like they were in charge. Brass tacks, baby, from here on out.
General Winfield Stuck
I think so. And I don’t think myself or anyone else really has the creds to second guess Obama’s political instincts. At least until this thing plays out to the end game. He doesn’t control the congress, dems just aren’t built that way, so it’s a fine line to walk being respectful to their house, while also pushing for what he wants.
So we have a month to fight it out for the best PR from both sides. That’s democracy in action. I never expected a passage with 60 votes, but it’s good politics for Obama and dems to give it the old college try and keep the moral highground.
He has let them know he holds the veto pen and has made clear without heavy handedness what needs to happen for his signature.
Ailuridae
Rockefeller is really good on health care reform and social justice issues broadly. He also gets to a good point for progressives relating to health care. If something is going to come of this fight that progressives want to own for generations there is not way it can get 60 votes in the Senate. So, if they pass something and it gets 60 or 61 votes that bill is going to be disaster because it will be too weak to address the problem. There simply aren’t 60 reasonable people in the Senate – we learned this with ARRA.
The best solution is to allow Nelson and whichever other corporate Dems to vote against the bill without letting them block it from coming to a vote. That’s just party discipline and obviously Reid has been poor at it. Some part of me fantasizes that now is the time he actually makes the Republicans fillibuster – that all this time he has been lying in wait for the perfect time to exert authority. Thats the kind of video that five years down the road, assuming a public option is successful could end a lot of political careers.
Patrick
Reading earlier comments here about the revenue neutral requirement for reconciliation bills, I just realized why Blue Dogs and repubs might be making changes to the bill that will actually increase costs. The bill cannot be passed with fifty votes.
Does that make sense?
ninerdave
@asiangrrlMN:
Before y’all get too excited…read.
Is a watered down bill passed through reconciliation (as I’ve mentioned above I’m an idiot on this subject) a good thing?
I’m not so sure.
PeakVT
@ninerdave: The 2010 expiration wasn’t for political reasons (though that’s a nice bonus for the Repukes). It was because the PAYGO window was 10 years long, and including a sunset clause made the total “cost” for the whole period less than the PAYGO limit. Their hope was that by 2010 the cuts from the 2001 bill would be so popular or the political price of “raising taxes” (which is what it would look like to a stupid public) so high that the new rates would be made permanent.
Plus back then they were using the rosy numbers left over from the Clinton administration. Remember how Greenspan was worried about paying off the debt?
bob h
Mess with the heads of the Republicans.
BC
What PeakTV said – they passed the tax bill with 10-year sunset so it wouldn’t show the massive drain on the treasury, and then started agitating to “make the tax cuts permanent” right afterward. Remember, that was one of the things that McCain wanted to do in response to the economic catastrophe we faced – make the tax cuts permanent. The 2010 sunset is where Obama said he would make the middle class part of the tax cut permanent, but let the taxes go back to pre-2001 for those make more than $250,000. Yeah, that’s the tax increase everyone and Joe the Plumber were talking about in the campaign last year.
Hunter Gathers
How long until the birther nonsense spills into the health care debate? The wingers are under order to disrupt town halls held by Dem Reps to voice their opposition to health care reform. And since 58% of the base of the GOP consists of birthers, I don’t think that it will be long before we see repeats of what happened to Mike Castle a few weeks back.
General Winfield Stuck
@General Winfield Stuck:
Oops! I forgot about the Byrd Rule in the Recon. process. Which is a pay go rule of a different horse.
Napoleon
@ninerdave:
Well remember that the Dems adhere to Pay As You Go, whereas the Rep. ditched it. That said I would think it would work out the same whether you went the reconciliation route or not.
Napoleon
@PeakVT:
Pay Go was not the limitation. There is a specific rule in the Senate called the Byrd rule that goes back to the early 70’s that says you can not pass ANYTHING through reconciliation that last more then 10 years out.
PeakVT
@Napoleon: Yes, the Byrd rule, not PAYGO. My bad. The rule is here. The PAYGO window was 5 years at the time. PAYGO was gamed by excluding the ongoing AMT “fixes” from the calculations.
IndieTarheel
I hope that if it should come
IndieTarheel
I hope that if it should come to reconciliation, that what is reconciled is not a watered-down piece of pap submitted just for the sake of saying, “We did something.” It appears to be too hard a process to settle for junk in the end, and whatever comes out of this, it’s almost a lead-pipe cinch that it will NOT be revisited in the near future (unless it is by the GOP in order to try to kill it).