“More often than not Republicans have used reconciliation to try to affect their agenda, so what’s good for the goose ought to be good for the gander,” he said.
Does anyone know if it was used by the repubs for budget issues, or for jamming their own agenda through? There’s a BIG difference.
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.
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.