Obama demands reconciliation to pass health care bill

President Obama at the White House with health care workers
President Barack Obama stands with health care professionals as he speaks about health care reform, Wednesday, March 3, 2010, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Health care professionals, from left are: Julie Babich, Roland Goertz, Barbara Crane, Stephen Hanson, Renee Jenkins, Christopher Lillis. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

President Barack Obama today called for the use of reconciliation to pass his massive health care initiative. Reconciliation is a Senate legislative process designed to facilitate contentious budget votes. The GOP regards its use for this purpose as an abuse of Senate rules and a trampling of minority rights.

In a White House address today, Obama called for an end to debate on the bill and rejected a GOP proposal to scrap it and start over. Without mentioning the word, he called for the simple majority vote that is a provision of reconciliation--

Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts – all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.

RNC Chairman Michael Steele, in a press release on the GOP web site, ridiculed the President's call for an up-or-down vote and recalls the President's past opposition to the use of reconciliation--

The president claims that his government-run health care experiment deserves an ‘up-or-down’ vote in Congress but the fact is that his plan has already received three ‘up-or-down’ votes: rejections from Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. What President Obama really wants to do is ram through his government takeover of health care with reconciliation, a parliamentary procedure that Senator Obama once said was ‘the wrong place for policy changes.’

In the face of the burgeoning reconciliation threat, GOP lawmakers are left with few options. Some lawmakers are vowing to fight the measure with personal appeals to voters in the form of communiqués and town hall meetings, a tactic which yielded much early success when employed by the GOP last year. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the House arm of the RNC, is launching an effort to target Democrats in conservative districts in an attempt to strip votes from the majority.

Speculation on the use of reconciliation began in November when passage of the Senate bill appeared endangered. Speculation surged in January when the Senate lost its ability to override filibuster debates upon the election of Scott Brown (R-MA). Filibusters, which require a supermajority of 60 votes to end, are prohibited under reconciliation rules.

Reconciliation has been endorsed by Democratic lawmakers and many on the left. Tom De Luca, writing in the Christian Science Monitor today, called for an end to the filibuster as "unconstitutional". GOP lawmakers and pundits on the right regard reconciliation as a procedural trick and a bad-faith effort to pass controversial legislation over minority objections. Daniel Foster, writing today at National Review Online, predicts that the use of reconciliation to pass the President's bill will result in "parliamentary chaos".

Critics of reconciliation characterize it as the "nuclear option", so named to characterize its use as extreme and also to describe the danger of producing unintended consequences. The "nuclear option" was the moniker bestowed on the measure when its use was proposed by GOP lawmakers in 2005, who were then frustrated by filibusters initiated by Democrats against President Bush's judicial appointees. Lawmakers found a compromise and the measure was never invoked.

In his speech, the President said that the measure incorporates GOP policy proposals, and he named two: the "funding state grants on medical malpractice reform" and a reduction in fraud. The first appears to be something that is not likely to be supported by the GOP. The second seems to be a commonsense measure that most likely has broad bipartisan support.

The President also claimed that his proposal is revenue-neutral, saying that is "paid for". By way of explanation he cited taxpayer subsidies, a new fee on insurance companies, and what appears to be a proposal for means-testing Medicare. The President offered no details on how these issues might affect the cost of his behemoth proposal, but the Heritage Foundation pegs the actual cost of the initiative at approximately $1.5 trillion.