Chuck Schumer, always the blow hard, is threatening the use of reconciliation to pass health care reform. Either Schumer is operating with half a deck, or his posturing amounts to a toothless threat. If I were a betting man, my guess is that Chucky is using this threat to deflate the public opposition to the socialist health care bill (eugenics, anyone?) during the August recess. If we believe putting the fear God into Congress members to be futile, the hope is we’ll take our marbles and skulk home. Not so fast, Chucky boy. The reconciliation process is not the big bad bogeyman that Schmuck Schumer would have us believe.

Oversimplified, the reconciliation appears to be a process requiring only 50 votes in the Senate assuming the Vice President is the tie breaker. Sounds bad. OMG, they can shove it down our throats, we’re dooommeeed!

To borrow the vernacular of advertising, “But wait, there’s more!”. As Chucky stammers off his threat, he forgets some very important rules concerning the reconciliation option. Oh, that pesky Byrd rule! From The American Prospect: The Health-Reform Reconciliation Fantasy:

But reconciliation is not just a “50-vote senate,” as it’s sometimes called. It’s a process constructed in the 1970s for a specific, limited purpose: to bring existing programs in line (reconcile them) with a long-term budget. Since then, it’s been used for huge policy changes: the Reagan and Clinton budget plans, the Bush tax cuts. But there are limits. Under the senate’s Byrd Rule, intended to hold the process somewhat to its original purpose, reconciliation can’t include provisions that have no budgetary effect or that have an effect outside the current budget window, which right now is five years. (Byrd Rule limits can be waived, but by 60 votes, so you’re back in the 60-vote Senate.)

To greatly oversimplify, what this means is that it’s almost impossible to use reconciliation to build something new. You can expand Medicare or shrink it, cut taxes or raise them. But to construct something that doesn’t already exist will inevitably require provisions that don’t in themselves have a significant budgetary impact: regulations, structures, guidelines, realigned bureaucracies. In particular, much of the structure of health insurance exchanges that are envisioned in the House and HELP Committee bills would not survive the Byrd Rule axe. Only the flimsiest outlines of a health reform bill would survive – the financing would be there, but not the structures to ensure that the money would be used properly. Further, reconciliation would give the Finance Committee – which controls the money – even more clout over the more liberal HELP committee.

Some have suggested using reconciliation to install the rough skeleton of reform, and then fixing it later, but the act of using reconciliation in the first place is such a nuclear option that it is likely to poison the waters not just with the four semi-reasonable Republicans but also with the Democrats who are left out of the deal, and will be needed on subsequent legislation.

The American Prospect is getting this right – something I rarely say about a liberal. But then the author ignores the cliff and plunges over:

But what if Congress did it in reverse? Use the 60-vote Senate to pass whatever they can pass now — we liberals will grumble but live with it — and then use reconciliation next year to fix it. With the exchange structure and subsidies established, it wouldn’t be hard to add an employer mandate, which would save money. With the rudiments of even a weak public plan in place, it wouldn’t be complicated to expand it and modify its eligibility rules, in ways that might save or cost money but in either event, involve budget changes to an existing program rather than creating something new. Aggregating small changes over the next few years (on the model of the steady expansion of Medicaid engineered by Henry Waxman and others over the 1980s and 1990s) could non-controversially build the kind of robust and equitable system we dream of.

It’s not ideal, and any political scheme based on do something now and hoping to fix it later faces the reality of all the partial reforms that litter the landscape. A plan that is so bad that it brings a backlash is more likely to be repealed than fixed. But it might just be that the big reform of health care can’t be achieved all at once. And this would at least get the pieces in place for the next phase to move forward, with or without the current obstructionists.

One problem though. I can think of many possibilities in 2010 or 2012 where Republicans can use either reconciliation or a veto proof vote to stick the knife in deep, twist it for good measure, and look into the eyes of socialism as we watch it die.

Many pundits will label my predictions as naive, but most pundits work under using the current rules of the game – they could not do otherwise. I have more freedom to take into account what I am seeing on the ground. A revolution is occurring, a tectonic shift in the political landscape, and where I once was a pessimist, I am now an optimist. Never have I felt such emotion, unbridled and so raw it possesses you.

But more importantly, I love my father (my mother is no longer with us). It is my duty to ensure that he is not cast away like a bag of trash because he is too old and considered not worth saving by some bureaucratic shithead. He contributed to this society, dutifully paying his taxes and being a good citizen. His life has not been easy, but his life is certainly worth something.

While I never say or write in the following manner, to the supporters of this bill – f**k you. Mess with my family and you are going to find one extremely pissed off and motivated voter shoving his boot up your ass as he pulls the voting lever. If my father dies under your watch, I would not want to be you – not for all the money and power in the world.

And I won’t be alone.

In other news and opinion:

Great stuff from Michelle Malkin here, here, and here.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey: The irony of “reconciliation”

Obama’s propaganda machine trying to save Obama from his own words.

Emperor Misha I on the Obama Socialist Joker Poster: It Certainly Seems to Have Hit a Nerve. We need a Rottweiler to help take a bite out of socialism. It’s meaty and delicious and looks even better the next day as a waste product.

Chew on this, assholes. It’s a two way street, but hey, I’d be happy to make it one way and chase your hapless cowardly asses before catching up to you and beating you to death with my pinky.

Truth to paper – now that’s real art.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.