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United States News Title: Democrats Owe Thanks to Reagan for Health-Care Vote Procedure March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Democrats owe the late President Ronald Reagan a measure of thanks for the parliamentary procedure they’re using this week to try to complete the U.S. health-care overhaul. It was Republicans, concerned that Reagan’s agenda might get bogged down in the Senate, who in 1981 transformed a procedure called reconciliation into what it is today: a tool used by both parties to muscle legislation through the Senate. “We really put some teeth in reconciliation,” said Steve Bell, former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. He was one of the architects of the strategy to enact Reagan’s spending reductions, along with then-budget director David Stockman. “We knew right off the bat we had a very small period of time to get it done because momentum is a very delicate thing,” Bell said in an interview, adding: “Does this sound familiar?” Senate Democrats hope this week to use reconciliation --and momentum from the House’s March 21 passage of the health-care overhaul -- to pass a package of changes to complete the plan. The health-care measure, President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority, aims to cut costs while subsidizing coverage for millions of uninsured Americans. Obama signed the main health-care bill yesterday. That measure never would have been approved by the House without the promise that the Senate would use reconciliation to make changes demanded by House Democrats. Simple Majority Reconciliation allows legislation to pass the Senate with 51 votes in the 100-member chamber rather than the 60-vote supermajority needed to break a filibuster. Democrats have 59 votes after losing a Massachusetts seat to Republican Scott Brown in a January special election. While both parties have used reconciliation to pass some of their biggest priorities, including President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, neither party has used the procedure as it was originally intended. “The reason it was created had absolutely nothing to do with what it became -- absolutely nothing,” said former Senate Parliamentarian Bob Dove in an interview. Reconciliation was created in 1974, when Democrats were fighting with President Richard Nixon over his refusal to spend money appropriated by Congress. When lawmakers introduced a bill to outlaw so-called impoundment, they included the reconciliation provision as a minor section. Last-Minute Changes It was part of a new congressional budgeting process that called for lawmakers to develop a tentative budget in the spring followed by a final one in the fall. The reconciliation procedure would be used in the fall to make last-minute changes to ensure Congress stuck to its budget even if, for example, tax revenue came in lower than expected. A reconciliation bill couldn’t be filibustered or debated for more than 20 hours so lawmakers could complete the process quickly before the government’s fiscal year ended. When Senator Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat, took the floor on March 19, 1974, to outline the legislation for his colleagues, he dedicated just two sentences to reconciliation. “It was just thought this would be a very small thing,” said Dove. Suggestions that reconciliation was created to cut the deficit are “not at all true,” he added. Lawmakers implemented the procedure for the first time in 1980, the final year of Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s administration, to cut $8 billion from a budget of almost $700 billion. Seized on Precedent Republicans, who won control of the Senate in November 1980, seized on that precedent the following year, loading much of Reagan’s budget-cutting agenda into a single reconciliation bill. “Once that door was opened just a little bit, we rushed in,” said Bell. The measure reduced spending by $130 billion over three years at a time when the annual deficit was $120 billion. A June 25, 1981, New York Times article said the administration had turned the budget process “completely on its head.” Then-House Rules Committee Chairman Richard Bolling, a Missouri Democrat, accused Reagan of using the tactic to “tyrannize” Congress. “Reconciliation is the most brutal and blunt instrument used by a president in an attempt to control the congressional process since Nixon used impoundment,” Bolling said, according to the Congressional Quarterly Almanac. Cutting the Deficit Since then the tactic has become commonplace. For much of its history it was only used for bills that cut the deficit. Republicans broke with that tradition to pass Bush’s tax cuts. When Democrats won control of Congress in 2006, they imposed new rules barring reconciliation bills from increasing the deficit. While many Republicans have lambasted Democrats for using the procedure on the health-care overhaul, arguing it was never intended to pass such sweeping legislation, Bell is not among them. “It is almost impossible to get anything significant done in the current political environment,” he said. “I am stunned the majority leader and his folks around him haven’t already used it.”
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#1. To: war (#0)
Oh my. What will Badeye say?
#2. To: lucysmom (#1)
Boof's silence speaks volumes enough. IN fact, he comes off as pretty "snart" when he says nothing.
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