Posted on 02/24/2010 4:07:54 AM PST by tobyhill
But Obama was supposed to be post-racial and post-partisan. How could this happen? He’s having a “bipartisan health summit” and then forcing through his socialist heant care takeover agenda regardless of what RINOs and real Americans want.
“Bipartisan” - Somehow, I don’t think that word means what Obama’s supporters think it means.
If they do it, the outrage will only intensify against the Democrats, and November may go from a disaster to a bloodbath for them. They seemed determined to continue on the path of political suicide.
CNN: “Resistance is futile”
I will love to see Harry Reid try reconciliation...and fail.
I will call his office and say, “This war is lost.”
The Republicans may have used it for tax cuts...but again, that is a BUDGET/REVENUE issue. Healthcare is not—of course it has costs, but it isn’t something that is currently being funded....I think that is how it works.
I don’t even know if the R’s did use it for tax cuts in 2001...I know several Democrats voted for the tax cuts.
Why doesn’t someone out them (dems)on those points? The American people are not stupid. We “get” this stuff now.
The Dems could have done this last year; could have done it early this year, yet they are still threatening to use it now?
Do it! What the frak are you waiting for, idiots?!
The funny thing will be that they passed the original bill with 60 votes, and rejected many amendments to that bill, some of which got more than 50 votes but less than 60. And now they are going to “amend” that same bill, sometimes in the same way, but with 50 votes.
Someone posted a list of the 21 reconciliation bills. Almost every one was a “money” bill. Tax cuts, revenue increases, changes in how much money was spent on a program.
There was one that implemented Clinton’s welfare bill, but even that was a “spending cut” in the budget where they were to save money by cutting welfare costs.
Reconciliation is restricted to bills that implement spending restrictions in the budget. So the budget says that total revenues will be “X” dollars, it is OK to use reconciliation to pass a tax cut that brings the revenue down to “X” dollars, but not to cut a program to get spending down.
So they could implement parts of the health bill that would work to meet budget goals on spending; for example, if the budget actually called for spending $400 billion on medicare, and current spending bills have it at $450 billion, they could cut $50 billion out of medicare via a reconciliation vote.
But there is no way to use reconciliation to implement the “public option”, to require people to buy health care, to create new agencies to regulate what procedures have to be offered by private insurers. And they can only do things like taxes on insurance if there is a specific budget item that passed that says they will get extra tax dollars by taxing insurance companies.
The nice thing is that each time the parlemaentarian decides that a budget item is ripe for reconciliation, amendments on HOW to meet that budget item only take 50 votes as well, and there is no limit to how many amendments can be offered to meet the budget. So the republicans could come up with 100 ideas for how to save money, and every “save money” budget item, they could introduce the same 100 amendments.
The link is to a fascinating news story, explaining how it took 4 extra days to pass the tax bill because the democrats kept introducing amendment after amendment, forcing vote on waiving the budget act. They said they were fighting the "process", because they thought more debate was necessary for something so "important" as passing a tax cut.
This line was interesting:
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, acknowledged the rules of the Senate would allow the Democrats to keep up the tactic for as long as they wanted, but as the chamber's chief scheduler he was not going to make their lives easy if they insisted on keeping it up.That seems to confirm that the rules would allow the republicans to force votes indefinitely."We're going to get it through the Senate as soon as we can. We're going to make our dead-level best to get a conference agreement," he said.
Lott said legislators would continue to work into the evening and that dinner had been canceled because "every time you take a break these amendments marry and multiply."
Of course, in the end, some democrats voted for the tax cuts, while Reid's problem here is that some democrats WON'T vote for the health care bill.
In another article, they note Bush tax bill got 240 votes in the house, and 58-33 in the senate (a lot of people didn't vote). McCain voted no.
Also, Democrats said they were fully involved in the process, unlike with health care:
Several Democrats argued that the bill was irresponsible and shortsighted, but Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana -- who represented Democrats in the conference committee meetings along with Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana -- said before the votes that "Democrats fully participated in this process."
Thank you for all the useful information. I , too,would have thought that this is a done deal...until I saw this:
This is a clip of many major dems (including Obama) having a hissy fit about the repubs. using reconcilliation. It is a must see!
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