As I mentioned earlier, today’s breaking budget news is that the congressional budget committees released their budget blueprints. There are some notable differences between the House and Senate resolutions, and both differ from the president’s proposal–the House plan, for instance, will drop the deficit to $600 billion over five years, compared to the $500 billion in the Senate plan, whereas the Congressional Budget Office predicted higher deficits under Obama’s outline. Still the administration and congressional leaders are playing these differences down.
There’s some good reason for that, but the bigger issue still looms in the background: reconciliation. Reconciliation enables certain types of fiscal legislation–including, significantly, some of Barack Obama’s major agenda items–to be bundled together and voted on immune from the threat of filibuster.
Republicans see this as a major threat and for the last several days have been lividly decrying the entire process, threatening to respond to any attempts to put health and energy reforms into a reconciliation bill by going ‘nuclear’. Nuclear in this instance has nothing to do with atomic physics or with filibustering judges but instead with a senatorial tendency to indulge in hyperbole when describing their powers.
Politico reported that a Republican Senate aid threatened that his party would respond to reconciliation by “shutting down the Senate through the use of parliamentary maneuvers such as forcing the reading of bills and amendments and prohibiting committees from meeting for more than a few hours at a time.”
That would really gum up the works! But here’s the thing. Budget committee chairman Kent Conrad does not include a so-called “reconciliation directive” in his budget resolution, and without that directive, there’s typically no reconciliation bill at all. That could quell some of the Republican outrage, but it’s by no means the final word. The House resolution does include such a directive, which can still make its way into the final resolution.
This sets the stage, in theory, for the scenario Elana reported on yesterday, wherein Democrats “hide the reconciliation ball” and, perhaps, include major health legislation in a reconciliation bill if the Senate doesn’t get its act together and come to a bipartisan agreement on reform.
That raises the issue of how all the Senate complications and Republican threats are weighing on the House’s plans. On that question a leadership staffer said, basically, there’s no reason to take the option off the table. “I think on the House side, there are a lot of backseat drivers for Harry Reid,” the staffer said. “House Democrats will not be the ones who worry about that threat.”
