Senate Dems: Turnabout's Fair Play on Reconciliation

Senate Dems: Turnabout's Fair Play on Reconciliation

Brian Beutler | August 24, 2009

Democratic party leaders have a message for Republicans, who are crying foul over the news that they may get shut out of the health care debate: turnabout's fair play.

In a memo that was drafted and circulated on background in April, Senate Democrats made the case that using a budget reconciliation bill to pass health care reforms is perfectly within their rights, given the Republicans' promiscuous use of the same tactic when they were in power. Excerpts of the memo were published by various news outlets back in the spring, but the memo doesn't appear to have been previously been published in its entirety until now. And now, with Democrats ramping up the threat that they'll invoke the process in the fall, they're rehashing those same arguments.

"(S)hould Republicans choose not to cooperate (on health care reform), the inclusion of reconciliation instructions (in the budget) provides a backup option which could be used to prevent a filibuster and approve legislation by a majority vote," the memo reads. "(T)here is nothing unprecedented or unusual about the use of reconciliation."


The memo goes on note that Congress has invoked the reconciliation 19 times since 1980, including in 2001 and 2003 when ", the Republican Congress used reconciliation to pass enormous tax cuts"

"Republicans not only used reconciliation rules to push tax breaks for the wealthy, they also made no meaningful effort to assist the growing number of uninsured Americans," it reads.

Back in the heyday of the Republican majority, the GOP was bullish on the idea of using the process to circumvent the filibuster, and now Democrats are hoping to bring that inconvenient fact back to haunt them.

"The fact is, all this rule of the Senate does is allow a majority of the Senate to take a position and pass a piece of legislation, support that position," said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who now bemoans the idea, in 2005. "Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don't think so."

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