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.
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!